What are your speaker and listener placement constraints (distance to front/rear and side walls, distance to speaker)? What's the room size? What are the acoustics like (lots of reflective surfaces, shelves stuffed with books, etc?)
Speakers designed for your intended placement near or away from walls are required, because if you don't take that into acount you can turn a speaker that would be +/- 1dB into +/-10dB which is not high fi.
Speakers with a lot of high frequencies in their power response are not going to be pleasant in a reflective room.
>Unless you're building a home theatre, or have a very small pair of monitors, I always suggest it is better to have a good full range speaker than a speaker with subs added. I would save the money and not buy the subs at this point.
Anything less than a 3-way (a single "full range" driver is really a mid-bass plus a tweeter with a mechanical cross-over between the two ways; the same in a back-loaded horn has) will suffer from midrange IM distortion problems when you combine bass with realistic output levels.
This includes the 2.5 way Studio 60s and even monitors with healthy 7 or 8" mid-bass units which are just getting to be sufficient mid-bass drivers.
Adding the third way in a separate box with an active cross-over buys you a lot - you can place the main speakers far enough from the wall so that the SBIR notch is out of their passband, sub close enough that it's always operating into quarter or eighth space, main speakers where they image bass, sub where it has better modal behavior, etc.
You don't want a ported speaker though. To get good integration with a ported speaker you need to cross it over an octave over the port tune so the port's not contributing bass, but it is leaking out-of-phase midrange energy. A sealed 2-way with a healthy sized (7 or 8") mid-bass would work better. Pair it with a 2nd order butterworth electrical high-pass and 4th order Linkwitz-Riley low-pass on the sub.
You'd also be better off putting more money in bass traps and less in electronics.
Finally, you might shop the used market. If you get something which doesn't suit your tastes you can sell it for what you paid less shipping costs and try something different.
Speakers designed for your intended placement near or away from walls are required, because if you don't take that into acount you can turn a speaker that would be +/- 1dB into +/-10dB which is not high fi.
Speakers with a lot of high frequencies in their power response are not going to be pleasant in a reflective room.
>Unless you're building a home theatre, or have a very small pair of monitors, I always suggest it is better to have a good full range speaker than a speaker with subs added. I would save the money and not buy the subs at this point.
Anything less than a 3-way (a single "full range" driver is really a mid-bass plus a tweeter with a mechanical cross-over between the two ways; the same in a back-loaded horn has) will suffer from midrange IM distortion problems when you combine bass with realistic output levels.
This includes the 2.5 way Studio 60s and even monitors with healthy 7 or 8" mid-bass units which are just getting to be sufficient mid-bass drivers.
Adding the third way in a separate box with an active cross-over buys you a lot - you can place the main speakers far enough from the wall so that the SBIR notch is out of their passband, sub close enough that it's always operating into quarter or eighth space, main speakers where they image bass, sub where it has better modal behavior, etc.
You don't want a ported speaker though. To get good integration with a ported speaker you need to cross it over an octave over the port tune so the port's not contributing bass, but it is leaking out-of-phase midrange energy. A sealed 2-way with a healthy sized (7 or 8") mid-bass would work better. Pair it with a 2nd order butterworth electrical high-pass and 4th order Linkwitz-Riley low-pass on the sub.
You'd also be better off putting more money in bass traps and less in electronics.
Finally, you might shop the used market. If you get something which doesn't suit your tastes you can sell it for what you paid less shipping costs and try something different.