Bookshelf Bake Off


Fellow Audiogoners,

Lend me your ears.  I live on a farm in South Georgia and have a 3+ hour drive in any direction to audition anything.  The price I pay for land, peace and horses I suppose.  I am putting together a secondary system and can't audition everything I have interest in, so I am hoping you can help me shorten the short list to a manageable set of maybe three (two would be even better) auditions for bookshelf speakers. They will be driven by 2 x PS Audio M700 Monoblocks, Schiit Freya+ tube preamp and a Mytek Brooklyn DAC+.  The space is fairly small at approx. 10'x20'.  For a number of reasons, floorstanders are not a possibility, hence the call for bookshelf speakers.  I would like to keep the budget in the $2K range, +/- a reasonable %.  I am not someone that feels the need to max the budget, i.e. linear correlation of price and quality, so feel free to suggest high value brands/models less than the max budget.  I have a pair of Focal Aria 906 in another system and very much like their sound, but want something a bit warmer with similar (or better) resolution.  Deeper low frequency extension would be a plus.  The brands I have narrowed the field to are:

Revel
Legacy
KEF
Monitor Audio
Sonus Fabre
PSB

This list is not written in stone, just my initial list after research.  Feel free to suggest anything I have omitted that warrants consideration.  Thanks in advance for your ears.

Mark


128x128Ag insider logo xs@2xmarkcdaniel
The Osborn Eos Reference is great bookshelf speaker and fantastic value.Maybe not as good as a Dynaudio Confidence C1 Platinum [which I think is the best you can buy] but close and about a third the price.The tweeters in both are absolutely top shelf .
I currently drive a pair of PSB bookshelf speakers with PS Audio Stellar Monoblock 700 amps. I find them to have excellent clarity, crisp highs, very good midrange and very good bass down to about 45hz. I supplement the bass with an old Orb Audio 8” sub and it gets down to around 28hz, remaining very clean. These speakers will go louder than I can stand with no distortion. It took me quite a bit of up and down, shifting them around, and fixing the toe in before I got them to disappear, but that isn’t unusual, depending on the room. PSB wasn’t on my list, but a local dealer had some and I was impressed enough to try them. I don’t regret it. The clarity and low noise factor is outstanding. 
Fritz Carreras..
He will send them
to you...
you listen...
you don’t like , send ‘em back...
don’t be afraid to plug the ports if they are close to the wall.
if you want to stay closer to budget, I think the Fritz Carbon 7's may be the ones to try.