Need your help finding a pair of speakers.........


Hello all,
I just sold a pair of AndraII's. Everthing is packed and ready for my helper to pick-up for shipping on Tuesday 12/27/2006. I have a budget of $20K-30K. Can you please give me some recommendations based on experience? It took me a long time and a lot of money to find the Andra's but my curiosity got the best of me so here i am looking for new stuffs. I would like to keep my electronics (conrad/johnson top-of-the-line). For the last 5 years, I have not kept anything for more than a year. This time, i would like to buy a pair of speakers that I can keep for a long time. If needed I will expand my budget but prefer not. No WILSON please, I have tried and they are not for me.
Thanks for your time,
Gina
Ag insider logo xs@2xginas
Ginas- It's not so much the size but how you proportion it (I could have said something else but ...). The object of the room is to not contribute or remove anything so you need either LOTS of time or professional help to identify what can be done to optimize the room. To do it right it can be a very expensive endeavor but if the absolute best performance is the goal it's a must. Check out member Mike Lavigne's effort to do just this: http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue16/lavigneroom.htm. There are other Audiogon members who have done this too, check out the member systems or search for Rives. Robert Harley of the Absolute Sound also did a similar effort with his system, but I don't recall the issue (it was a couple of years ago). I wish I had the space and the money to do this but alas, I don't and probably never will!
You should strongly consider the Evolution Acoustics MM2 or MM3. Simply incredible.
What type of music do you want to reproduce?
If you want speakers that get out of the way of the reproduction better than just about anything in existence,that are state-of -the -art imagers,true point sources and reveal previously unimagined textures and timbres in your recordings---and are naturally dynamic with no shouty,horn-like colorations,
then investigate the new Ocellia top model with dual concentric driver and no crossover.The top model would be as full range as most any music system would ever need.They really do everything when it comes to music reproduction.
Not for soundeffects,though.
Would probably be better off selling CJ amp,whichever model, and pairing with top flight SET of at least 8 watts.
A speaker to get off the merry go round with---if that is what you really want to do.
http://www.ocellia.com/
Warren,
You just because you have a tough time settling on a speaker, does not mean I do. Still have the Zu?? You raved on and on about the Caravelles.....forgot what it was you raved about prior to Caravelles...and now it's Zu. What next in your "different speaker every year" list? Seems rather odd you give advice on speaker purchases when you cannot settle upon one speaker yourself.
Ellery911, a great speaker is a great speaker. One post or 100. GMA builds great speakers. I am hardly the only one saying that. Do some research.....you seem to be good at that.
Gina,
Again call Roy Johnson at Green Mountain Audio. Will cost you a couple bucks for a phone call. See for yourself.
Gina,
Found a Stereophile review on these speakers. Looks like your listening perception is quite good.
Some excerps:
"Predicting how these three nearfield responses will sum at the listening position is difficult; shown to the left of fig.4 is my best guesstimate, with the acoustic phase and path-length differences taken into account. note the enormous measured suckout in the upper crossover region on this axis, centered on 3kHz. I must admit that I didn't find the Andra to be as free from coloration as WP did. I noted a slight degree of hollowness that made violin and viola, for example, sound a little as if played with mutes. The tweeter is 33" from the floor, which is on the low side. (Tom Norton's research has shown that a typical listener's ear in a typical chair is 36" high.) Fig.5 shows the Andra's response at different heights; it can be seen that the crossover-region suckout is worst on the tweeter axis. The broad overlap between the tweeter and twin midrange units does appear to make the speaker very sensitive to listening height. Perhaps the flattest measured response is obtained 10 degrees below the tweeter axis (the trace at the front of this graph). However, this represents a listener with his ear around 20" from the floor. By contrast, fig.6 shows the Andra's measured response 10 degrees above the tweeter axis, which represents a typical listener sitting in something like a director's chair. While there is still a lack of energy in the speaker's upper crossover region, it is much less severe than on the tweeter axis. Again, the crossover suckout is worst directly on-axis, the "horns" between 2 and 4.5kHz to the sides of this graph suggesting that the speaker's total output into the room does not feature a lack of energy. Only in a small room, therefore, with the listener sitting close and low, will the Andra sound hollow. The larger the room and the farther away the listener, the better-balanced the EgglestonWorks will sound. Despite its sloped baffle and low-order crossover, the Andra is not time-coherent on typical listening axes. (It will be time-coherent around or below 20" from the floor, which suggests the tiltback of the baffle is too mild.) Fig.8, for example, shows the step response on the tweeter axis. The tweeter's output is the sharp up/down spike just before the 4ms mark, followed by the midrange units in the same acoustic polarity. As with the frequency response, the nature of the Andra's cumulative spectral-decay plot depended very much on the measurement axis. Fig.9 shows the waterfall plot associated with the response in fig.6, 10 degrees above the tweeter axis. In general it is impressively clean, though there is some low-level hash present in the mid-treble. But if the microphone was lowered by 5 degrees, nearer the tweeter axis (fig.10), a resonant mode at 4.7kHz appeared, associated with a response peak at the same frequency. This and the excess of top-octave energy might tend to make the balance rather bright, everything else being equal"
Interesting to note Stereophile felt the larger the room the better, yet some here are urging you to make your listeing room smaller. Also interesting is that on the manufacturers website, this speaker is claimed to be time/phase coherent and Stereophile measurments prove otherwise. Can believe everything you hear or read Gina.
Good luck.