Thanks for the ideas everyone. Dodgealum, your experience is fascinating, since you've come from the same original point as I have. The Daedelus speakers looks really interesting; 3 way, superbly constructed cabinets, efficient, natural driver materials - plenty of plus points already. However I fear that even the smallest designs would overload my room. The Pan is larger than an LS3/6 cabinet, and larger than the Harbeth SHL5. It's not a lossy box design like the BBC monitors, so I suppose that would help, but I'm still cautious about that size of cabinet in my room. (Mind you, I've had Klipsch La Scalas in the room, but that was a month of madness!). Still, you've peaked my interest and I'll try contacting the UK Deadelus guy.
Ctsooner, Vandersteens look interesting to me, but I don't think they've got a distributor over hear at present. I know one or two people on the UK forums have used them but they are very rare here, which is a shame.
So many designs from the US don't seem to make it over here. I think distributors are very conservative about what they think people want for UK living rooms. And British speaker design has been dominated by polite, skinny floor standers. We have small living rooms, and there seems to be a 'better heard not seen' design philosophy.
I've never been too keen on floor standing designs, but the Devore Gibbons have been one exception to that. What Fjn04 says about the Orangutans does also apply to the Gibbons to some extent too, I think. Devore are just very picky about amps in general. They can sound mediocre with the wrong amps, but thrive with high quality valve designs. A couple of us took some amps over to try on our friend's Nines and it was bemusing. Some amps that sounded great with Harbeths or Proacs didn't sound good at all with the Devores. But with our friends VTL amps, the Nines are wonderful - a beautiful tonal richness, a huge sense of space, great dynamics, and all of these qualities are well balanced.
The big selling point about Harbeths is that they can sound very good with quite modest amps. I went to a session Alan Shaw hosted when he launched the SHL5+ recently and they were using a Quad cd player and QSP power amp. The whole system would be little more than £6k here, but like my friends Devore/VTL system, it was just wonderfully balanced - superb, especially with orchestral and choral music.
So it's easier to get the best out of Harbeths, but I think the Devores can deliver more when you give them the amps they want. They are just rather demanding.
I think I could live happily with the Monitor 30.1 in my small room, but if only they had that extra half octave. So then there is the question of subs, and the endless frustration of trying to integrate....
Ctsooner, Vandersteens look interesting to me, but I don't think they've got a distributor over hear at present. I know one or two people on the UK forums have used them but they are very rare here, which is a shame.
So many designs from the US don't seem to make it over here. I think distributors are very conservative about what they think people want for UK living rooms. And British speaker design has been dominated by polite, skinny floor standers. We have small living rooms, and there seems to be a 'better heard not seen' design philosophy.
I've never been too keen on floor standing designs, but the Devore Gibbons have been one exception to that. What Fjn04 says about the Orangutans does also apply to the Gibbons to some extent too, I think. Devore are just very picky about amps in general. They can sound mediocre with the wrong amps, but thrive with high quality valve designs. A couple of us took some amps over to try on our friend's Nines and it was bemusing. Some amps that sounded great with Harbeths or Proacs didn't sound good at all with the Devores. But with our friends VTL amps, the Nines are wonderful - a beautiful tonal richness, a huge sense of space, great dynamics, and all of these qualities are well balanced.
The big selling point about Harbeths is that they can sound very good with quite modest amps. I went to a session Alan Shaw hosted when he launched the SHL5+ recently and they were using a Quad cd player and QSP power amp. The whole system would be little more than £6k here, but like my friends Devore/VTL system, it was just wonderfully balanced - superb, especially with orchestral and choral music.
So it's easier to get the best out of Harbeths, but I think the Devores can deliver more when you give them the amps they want. They are just rather demanding.
I think I could live happily with the Monitor 30.1 in my small room, but if only they had that extra half octave. So then there is the question of subs, and the endless frustration of trying to integrate....