Sound Stage and Imaging

Speakers, speakers, speakers.

Without good recordings, good acoustics, good source and proper Pre/Amplification ..... no ticky, no laundry.

You have a 20x20xH? room, the potential for imaging is fab, but if you also like DYNAMICS/Slam, you'll need an amp that'll deliver clean grunt. To get speakers & amplification for $2G`s is a pipe dream, but ya have to start somewhere.

Hunt for 8ohm speakers with an efficiency north of 93db. Speakers that'll mate up nicely with a Bryston 3Bsst squ/3 (3B`s are a bargin) ..... that ought to fill the volume of your room for starters.

Enjoy the journey.

re "what about"

they are all good value, safe choices. I have never heard Dali but the others (some models of KEF, B&W and SF) - however, none of them get me excited. From your budget you could get a used Dynaudio Contour 20s or Harbeths or MoFi speakers. What is your approach to narrow down your search?

@mahgister "...imaging is NEVER achieved by luck or haphazard owners actions , but by acoustic good conditions and gear synergy for sure ..."

Are you speaking about image as a holographic or two dimensional ?

IF you have an amp with some grunt the big brother of the model 1’s and 2’s you admire is the Vandersteen 3A - signature. Time and phase correct in the analog domain  and drivers and crossovers seemless matched by hand in the anechoic chamber in California since 1977. 

@mijostyn only got part of it right, he isn’t a simpleton.. BTW, you really should build your own electrostatic…1982 project for me…. hand rubbing graphite on to mylar and then taking the Beveridge path…. Harold was a gem….we sold his gear

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@tomic601 

I have been down that route. I now only build stuff I know I can do better than anything commercially available and I can not do better than Sound Labs although I have made some modifications. Nothing spectacular. I added a second set of inputs so I can drive the high frequency transformer separately and bypassed all of the controls. 

I installed Beverages in two systems back in 1980 or so, the tall Round Towers with Mark Levinson equipment, Tandberg tape decks and LP12s. Fine systems for the day. I never met Harold but I knew Jim Strickland of Acoustat well. I ran 2+2s for decades.