The Room, not us, determines our speaker choices

as an example, an mg 20.1 in a small room sounds better than any book shelf speaker in a small room, because i don't like box speakers. i can respect some brands , but i can't live with them very long. their faults annoy me.

A close friend tried to integrate 20.1's into a smallish listening room (well, smallish by 20.1 standards). He went through great lengths in everything from room treatment to stands to Xover to biamplification. The end result sounded very impressive, but ultimately restrictive in terms of throwing a realistic soundstage. Personally, I could not live with that huge compromise knowing I was not going to change the room. There are many alternatives that would work much better. Ultimately my friend decided the same and sold the 20.1's. He now uses a very different speaker design in the room which is much better suited to the space an the results are breathtaking in every which way. He'd also tried Quad 988's in the same room which rendered very similar challenges as the Maggies did. As good as both the planar speakers sounded in there I would NEVER be able to live with their faults within that space. At the recent CES I heard a pair of very odd speakers from Gradient called Helsinki. It was designed to alleviate some of the major challenges of integrating the speaker into any room. I don't know how it actually works in practice since I only heard it there, but the theory, which I'm sure can be better stated on their site, seemed like an interesting concept, and, more importantly, their sound was outstanding. I think I've seen them written up in a recent rag too.

Saw a good flick last night called, "Bottle Shock"

There's a great line in that film that comes to mind reading the all too familiar "pass the Grey Poupon" rhetoric I read here often.

You’re a snob, and it limits you

Put a pair of great speakers in a small, floor-to-ceiling-tiled room and they will most certainly not sound "good", and few, if any, would want to spend any time listening to music in that room. To a lesser extreme a room can certainly obscure the attributes of any speaker, some more than others. Compare ten pairs of speakers in the bathroom setting I describe and I doubt very much whether anyone could tell that much about how each speaker distinguishes itself from the others as when set up in a more ideal environment that suited the specific speaker. Sure, you'll be able to glean some useful information from the comparison, but I don't think I would want to make a decision based solely on the information I came away with. Broadly comparing the rooms at CES with those at RMAF I personally thought that there were far more rooms sounding better at CES than at RMAF and I do believe the difference in the rooms being contended with had something to do with that. To some extent I'd agree though, that the differences are not so extreme in practice as to really obscure being able to discern important qualities of a speaker's performance. There are consistencies in performance that come to mind from one show to the other (Roger Sanders for instance - though I felt his speakers sounded great in both cases, I thought at T.H.E. show recently, they were actually more compromised by (?) than at RMAF so go figure). I would not, however, dismiss the room so flippantly...it almost seems like a contrarian fishing expedition to me. I don't see it as a mechanic blaming poor tools. A mechanic working to tune a Ferarri in a well-lit, comfortably heated, well equipped garage vs the same mechanic, same tools, tuning the same car in a cold vibrating room with dim lighting. Same tools, same mechanic, different environment = likely different results.