Speakers, floor standing or Bookshelfs

I personally prefer to have high quality full range speakers… without subs. Although I have had floor standards with two subs for about thirty years.

Good quality floor standers are designed for coherent sound across the spectrum.

Then there is a question of what you want. Are you going for coherent realistic sound or highly accentuated bass to slap you I the chest. It is very typical when I go to a high end audio guys house he has the subwoofers way too high… way toooo high! This will muddy up the imaging and cover up other frequencies. But you spent a lot of money you want to hear them… But it is all a question of what you are going for.

I am after musical and natural… not a cartoon or a heartless revealing system sticking details in your face. I love great imaging, and have it. But you can get great imaging cheaper (big generalization) with small stand mounted speakers with subs. But, typically there are trade offs.

sounds like you have a pair a subs and 2 floorstanders? My 2 cents: be in a small room, you would be better off with bookshelf speakers. With many ifs and buts as there are so many variables.

More flexibility and (usually) better bass with (at least two high quality) subs.

Stand mount main speakers can image better but the output capability must be sufficient for the size of the room you are trying to fill. Puny stand mounts with subs doesn’t work for me. I would look for main speakers that legitimately cover down to 50 Hz, or a bit lower, so the subs are only covering the bass. It is better if the stand mounts are designed to operate optimally within their given frequency range and do not attempt to cover the lowest octave using their small’ish drivers, which can muck up the bass and the midrange.

As @ghdprentice pointed out, it is also very important to roll the subs in carefully and not run them too high or too loud, as a little less is often just right.

It depends. Room size, room acoustics, and setup are are big factors. The specifics of speakers in question and how they play in your room are more critical than whether they’re floor standers or bookshelf IMO.

Two subs help smooth out room nodes, and you can do more experimentation with placement. Depending on the subs, there are usually lots of options for the low pass crossover frequency, gain, and phase.

I prefer to set the crossover frequency of subs at the lowest setting, run my main flloor standers full range, and set the gain of the sub very low. YMMV, but I hear a lot of subs that have both the gain and the crossover frequency set to high. IMHO it’s best not to feature the subs, but to let them just augment the bass your main speakers put out. Experimentation is the key.

I have been wondering the same.  Got 150W now with two full range towers and a RELT9x.

Room is 12 X 24 roughly 

I been wondering if a couple of Dynaudio Heritage Specials with the REL would be enough.

Image and staging would be the goal.  

They would have to do pretty dang good to best my QUAD-Z4 in place currently.