Help - new house - new setup?


I have just moved house and the new room is about 20x18 with 28 foot ceilings and glass/openings on 2 of the walls.

My system was CAT SL1 with spectron musician amp playing through VS VR4jrs. Front end Michell Orbe and Oppo 105.

I went all HT and got Halo A51 and JC1 monos with a Marantz 8802.

I was expecting a big improvement but the sound is lost in this room and sounds poor.

Someone suggested JL audio fathom to take the weight off the VR4rs so I got a 212 which has improved bass substantially but SPLs are still weak.

I feel I need to upgrade the JR4s and would like to spend up to 10k on some new speakers or Albert is advocating 5k to upgrade the JR4s.

Any suggestions would be most welcome as I live in the sticks and my nearest decent dealer is 250 miles away.

I am considering ML Montis/Summit, Revel Salon, Wilson Sophia 3, Thiel cs 3.7 and Legacy Whispers among others.

My main concern is having a speaker that will give the SPL level necessary for this room.
musicalal
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.
Have you tried running the Audyssey speaker setup software that comes with the Marantz? I suggest that you run the setup on full auto and then analyze the results to look for any clues or anomalies it finds as it runs thru the various tests. If possible, try to find a PC program to help the analysis. There are many on the market that can help you understand your room better based on the setup data. What you learn can then be used to guide you towards making the right decisions rather than just throwing money at it.

Understanding your new room's acoustic properties could make it your finest "component". I would love to have that room!
MvBuddah,
thanks for that advice.

I am trying different speaker and equipment positions this weekend and will then rerun audyssey.
My system is in the family room that measures 21'x33'x15'. Speaker on the short wall and are not close to any walls so no boomy bass or reflection problems. It's a lively room and don't need much room treatment. I'm using a tube amp and have no problems filling the room with high volume. I much prefer a large room with high ceilings.

When I 1st moved in, my Gallo speakers were too small so I gave them to a family member. I'm not familiar with VS VR4jrs so can't comment. I think you just need to move your speakers around until you find a good spot or buy new bigger speakers.