Monitor speakers pros/cons

The above posters all agree with me ;-) so I would just like to add my 2 cents and hope it helps.

Your room is quite big and so is your budget. There are some darn good full-range speakers available for what you have to spend, including my Meadowlark Shearwater Hot Rods. They image beautifully. You can get center and rear channel units from Meadowlark too. The Shearwaters go down to 40 Hz easy, maybe lower, but I didn't get that performance out of them till I upgraded the power cord on my Klyne preamp to an Ensemble Powerflux.

Your Attraction has a great preamp by all reports, so it deserves a premium cord if it doesn't have one already.

Getting a musical system match with a sub is a headache. I wouldn't consider a sub unless I knew for sure the rest of my system was already giving its best.

Woops, please excuse the duplicate posts, folks. Must try to find a better way to increase my readership ;-)

No problem Tobias - I read them all word for word :-)

If I had a 20x30 room and a $10K budget, I'd start by looking at floor standers and go the monitor route only if I was still left wanting. You don't mention whether this room is dedicated or shared-purpose - if it's the latter, I'd be more likely to go the monitor route, as they're less visually obtrusive. As others have said, $10K can buy a lot of speaker, and an incredibly good performing one, so if you have the room for it, that's what I'd do. -Kirk

Room size is only a general factor. I am sure I would be moving some day. No married so I just have at it.

I really am looking for new speakers and am wondering what a better route might be. It seems that the less cabnet one buys, the better the drivers/design might be. Also with HT if I already am using subs, why not use them all the time.

Thanks all
Marty

Since your settings and set-up with the subs are likely to be ideally optimized differently for music and HT, you may not want to depend on them for your music reproduction if they're primarily used for HT. The best way around this is to go fuller-range on the mains, and push the sub response down in frequency so that they don't interfere with the music as much. For what sounds to me like actually a fairly large room size, and given your budget and dual-use intentions, I'd go floorstander on the speakers, and use the subs only for true sub-bass augmentation, or turn 'em off entirely when playing music. (Then again, I don't care about HT at all compared to music, and consequently don't even own an HT set-up [though I've sold 'em], so take my word only for what it's worth...)