Best improvement for the buck

People who keep changing their cables do so mainly because they never fix the underlying issues with their system, poor acoustics, poor speakers, poor speaker interaction with their room, the rare but not unheard of poor interaction between amp and speaker .... cables, unless there is something truly wrong with them, are so far down the list, it is laughable, and it is mainly the cable cult that pushes them, no matter what. For some people, every problem can be solved with a hammer.

I am a fan of Magnepan, especially if you have an untreated room. It is why they win "best" of show so much. I don't think it is because they are so obviously better than other speakers in a properly setup room, but that they work well without treatments giving them a serious edge in those situations.

Even with the Magnepan, room treatments will still help. The are less immune to floor/ceiling effects, but still need wall treatments for optimum performance, and then bass, which brings us to your subs, which don't sound too hot. Better subs, and perhaps better bass management from and equipment standpoint, are the next step up, and if done in conjunction with some basic room treatment, is going to make a difference so far beyond what any cable would ever do that it is almost laughable discussing them.


Most Magnepan users are pretty set on their speakers, but if you are willing to invest in a "room", and $900 is not going to do it, but I personally believe that the combination of flatter frequency response, even in room, and lower distortion of a good dynamic speaker can result in better sound than your 1.7i, but I will certainly give credit to the "sound" of a planer array may not give something you give up easily.

Robert 
What are your thoughts on the swarm bass arrays?

"When I was young, I'd place a penny on the head shell when it went over a skip on the record..... really!"

I did the same except it was not a penny. As time wore the record out, and time is money and vice versa, I started putting bigger coins to accomodate bigger and bigger skips.

The difference from then is that I am still young, if not younger.

Audiomaze,

I can't comment on the swarm which is a specific model of bass array, but conceptually bass arrays are much easier to integrate into most listening rooms versus, well almost anything else. If you have the money and space, you can use room treatment, but doing it right, it not easy, and taming deep bass requires large structures or good/lucky use of harmonic traps.  If you have a lot of flexibility in placement, very good results are possible with 2, but 4 is going to allow more flexible placement. Careful with subs near mains. If the swarm has reasonable bass management and they are low distortion so you don't get false images, then I would expect they will work well.

Those Blue Jean interconnects will throttle anything you put through them. I speak from experience.