I've owned the winds, forests and hawks. I've used high powered solid state in seperate form and integrated. If you are not going to try and fill a large room, then the forests are the way to go. The forests are extremely musical, dynamic and coherent. The winds suck alot of power and need a pure top end signal with musical cables...same for the forests except the forests are 8ohms and alot easier to control. I found the krell 400xi was an amazing match for the forests, especially using MIT cables.