Can NOLA's "Boxer" compete with big floorstanders?

I have listened on a number of occasions to the Nola Boxers, including at a local dealer's with our audio club and for a week in my 18 by 20 foot room in my system (amps are Lamm ML 1.1s). The Boxers are beautifully finished (get the cherry, the black gloss is too hard to keep clean) and are well-designed and cannily balanced to give a pretty satisfying, if perhaps a little warm, bass response while doing an excellent job of reproducing the rest of the frequency range. Jgwilson is right, though, for full-range bass you'll need a subwoofer. The Boxers do an excellent job imaging and at retrieval of detail, and it is only in comparison with Nola's far more expensive speakers utilizing an open baffle and ribbon tweeter (such as the Baby Grand References) that they can sound just a little "boxy" or lacking the last word in airiness and delicacy in the high frequencies (if this characteristic is high on your priorities, the Martin Logans (which I heard just briefly) are very good in this respect). They did a nice job filling my room with music; they can deliver good spls, too, but if pushed too hard they can get a little congested on full range complex orchestral works. Depending on your listening biases, they may be just what you're looking for; I think, though, that if you can afford them and you had planned on having the Boxers on stands out in the room anyway, the Nola Contenders offer the pluses of the Boxers in addition to a little better bass extension and smoother response in that region, and have a more relaxed presentation at higher spls. IMHO, of course.

I must agree with Mapman, omnis take some getting used to, but once you get used to them it is hard to go back. My speaker system is very similar in its presentation to an omni, and I have always liked the spaciousness and soundstaging of speakers like mine, the Ohms, Shahinians and mbls. I find it difficult to break away from that presentation, as it is one aspect of the reproduction of music through electronics that can, in my view, make a recording sound more like a real, live event (another being dynamics; there are plenty more that come into the equation as well), and one that I place a priority on. I will acknowledge that some of the soundstage is probably created by the speakers and the room they're in rather than an exact reproduction of the recorded venue, but there is still good image location and palpability within that soundstage, maybe not as pinpoint as with a traditional speaker but perhaps more like what you'd hear in real life.

All that said, there are different priorities that each person has in their listening biases, and I was impressed with the Boxers, I thought they were among the best monitors that I have heard. You will not find them bass shy unless you listen to a lot of recordings with significant output below 35-40 Hz, and in a smaller room their dynamic restrictions are not likely to come into play.