Help - new house - new setup?

Zd you're right; I was thinking he was using two stereo amps. Tough to biamp with a pair of monos!

Don't think of your room as a problem, think of it as an opportunity to try some stupid big speakers. :)

I like a couple of Douglas' suggestions: the Montanas and the Legacy Whispers.

If I had a huge space, I might very well do Montanas. There's a lovely pair of XPSs here for 8k (no connection); those and good subs would make some some big music. (I'm pretty sure Peter designed the XPS with HT in mind, btw.)

John

"06-04-15: Jdoris
Don't think of your room as a problem, think of it as an opportunity to try some stupid big speakers. :)"

At least someone here is thinking clearly. For a moment there, I thought we were fresh out of audiophiles.

My thinking is that the best system is the one that sounds the best to you. I can't get overly concerned about the high ceiling absent that issue, the guy just wants to build a system he will like. I say start with whatever loudspeaker you like that is appropriate for the floor dimensions given there being open adjacent areas balconies and a vey high ceiling. Then buy an amp or amps to drive them that you like and then get a really nice pre-amp. Decide what sources you want to use possibly before the pre if you are going to want to use a built in phono stage. Happy hunting, auditioning and system building, it may take a while.

First things first. No matter how nice the speaker placement in your previous home was, it is entirely irrelevant to what will work in the new place. You need to experiment quite a bit with speaker and listening chair placement. This could be random trial and error or use of some systemmatic methodology (google "Wilson" or "Sumiko" method). If you go with some kind of placement calculation, you will still need to actually do a lot of experimenting.

A room with a nearly square floorplan tends to be problematic, and the high ceiling makes it worse. High ceilings tend to suck the life out of the sound. Still, I have heard very large rooms with high ceilings sound surprisingly good when the speakers were properly placed.

In rooms like this, multiple subwoofers make sense. The use of two or more subwoofers is not to get more bass (most subwoofers can deliver excessive quantities of bass to almost ANY room), but to achieve more uniform bass coverage.

I am less enamoured with the idea of going with bigger speakers for higher sound pressure levels. While I am a fan of big speakers (I like certain horn systems), I particularly enjoy listening at quite low sound levels. Quality, not quantity matters most to me. If you try to overcome the dead sound of your setup with higher volume level, you could make the contribution of destructive room reflections and resonance worse. I would try moving the listening seat closer to the speakers (and move the speakers farther away from the side walls), to make the setup more of a near-field setup; this decreases the contribution of the room to the sound. It is a "free" experiment.

Good luck and I hope everything works out.