Recommend speakers for a large living room


Hi, I am moving to a new apartment with a large living room (38" x 23", plus a dining area & kitchen). I am planning to have 2 different sitting areas given the size. Here is a picture of the floor-plan: https://ibb.co/J5szvj9

Everything is wood floors except on the blue squares where I plan to put carpet. I’ve been thinking of using omni-directional speakers (German Physiks Borderland) given the area is large and there are multiple listening locations. But I’d like to get some recommendations & also some ideas of where it would be best to place the speakers - so far my idea is to put them on the red circles.

My budget for speakers is ~$50,000.

dpal
I will sell you my Revel F2062 for $40k and then you will have $10k for a big-ass rug.
I am planning on moving to Montana and they have big spaces. I want to buy a vehicle and have $75,000, what should I buy?

That is about the same as your question.  What components are you using?  How loud do you listen?  What music do you listen to?  Given your statement, you are listening in multiple positions, do you intend to have a critical listening position, or are you interested in just having a balanced sound throughout the room?

If it is the latter, I would suggest you consider a set of Ohm Walsh 4000s and 4 subwoofers in a distributed array for smoothest bass throughout the room (something like Rythmik F15s, HSU ULS-15 MK2  or SVS SB 3000).  I would also invest in a few thousand dollars in room treatments.  The speaker setup will run you $10,000-12,000 depending on the subwoofers, all in maybe $15,000.  Put the rest of the money to use for something else.  
Thank you for providing so much information. I agree that the red circles make sense for your speaker locations.

Apologies in advance for this: What I’m going to suggest is not something that you can buy off-the-shelf, to the best of my knowledge; however I will be speaking from experience.

Speakers with a very wide radiation pattern could provide wide enough coverage, but with an omni you’ll be getting a strong early reflection off the wall behind the speakers. Early reflections tend to degrade clarity and imaging, in particular image depth.

For that off-to-the-side sitting area, a unique problem arises: Even with wide-pattern speakers, the image will be strongly pulled to the near speaker because its output will arrive so much earlier than that of the far speaker.

Imo here is a solution: Imagine a pair of speakers with 180 degree dispersion designed to have their backs up against the wall. The INNER 90 degrees of each speaker (which would cover the living room sitting area) is of a fixed loudness, but the OUTER 90 degrees of each speaker has adjustable loudness. So each speaker would have two arrays of drivers: A fixed-SPL array for the inner 90 degrees, and a variable-SPL array for the outer 90 degrees.

What you would do is, turn down the loudness of the OUTER 90 degrees on each speaker, until you still get a decent soundstage in that off-to-the-side sitting area.

This can work because the ear localizes sound by two mechanisms: Arrival time and intensity. The near speaker will inevitably "win" arrival time, but if we reduce the SPL of the near speaker’s output by the right amount, the far speaker will "win" intensity (loudness) by a comparable margin, and the net result will be an enjoyable instrument spread from well off to the side. The effectiveness of this approach will vary throughout that area, but for everyone in that area it will be better than with conventional speakers whether omni or wide-pattern or whatever.

One beneficial side effect of getting the radiation patterns right for this approach is, we will have very little energy in the midrange and treble regions bouncing off the wall behind the speakers as undesirable early reflections.

Another benefit of the well-controlled radiation patterns is that the reverberant field would have essentially the same spectral balance as the first-arrival sound, so the tonal balance would hold up well throughout the entire space. This may not be the case with speakers whose radiation patterns change significantly, as that skews the spectral balance of the reverberant field, and the farther back you are, the more the reverberant field dominates the perceived tonal balance.

In the centered living room listening area, within the coverage pattern of each speaker’s inner-90-degrees array, each speaker’s outer arrays will just be adding a bit more spectrally-correct, late-onset reverberant energy, which is desirable. So everybody in the room benefits.

(I design speakers and spend time working with radiation patterns to help meet particular requirements, in case it wasn’t obvious.)

Duke
I listened to the German Physics speakers and was unimpressed.
They were good, but not great- especially for the price.
If you can listen to MBL, I think you would be on a better track-given your budget.
Bob
Definitely check out the OHM Walsh speakers at

https://ohmspeaker.com/

These are tweaked omnis that are designed to go closer to walls than many speakers out there, especially full omnis like GP or MBL.

Also you will save a lot of money with OHM compared to either of those and they are made right here in good old Brooklyn, USA and offer top notch customer service and support to boot.

Model needed and cost is determined by room size. Couldn’t be easier to choose the right model for a specific room. Bigger models for bigger rooms cost more. The biggest model can be adjusted for room size. That’s it.

I own 2 pair:   larger 5XXX models I run in one system  with 12" driver room adjustable and smaller more basic 8" model in another.