Looking for "realistic" speakers

I'm in Maryland

Actually, what you need is a whole house gizmo that prevents surges to take out your valuable electronic stuff. I had a Vandersteen amp fried because of a surge and put in a surge protector. It protects the house and makes the system sound better too. If you are interested I'll go out and check the brand.

"Best realistic speakers under $5K anyone? I currently have everything in a fairly small room, that may or may not change in the near future. I want something that can scale - but giant Maggies (or anything else giant) won't work."

I'd agree with others about allocating more than $5,000 of your check for speakers. Can you expand on what you mean by "scale"? I do think I understand what you are talking about not being impressed with speakers under $10K, especially if your are talking about traditional speaker lines that sell via dealers.

On Saturday, I was able to audition some speakers in Houston at a dealer as well as at an "Audio Fest" at a local hotel. At the hotel, Legacy Audio was demonstrating their whole line, including flagship models as well as the more reasonably priced Focus HD. They also had the new Signature HD, but I did not get to hear it. I also heard the Dynaudio Focus 340 and Sonus Faber Venere 3.0 at the dealer.

Now, the 340 are very high quality and accurate speakers, but they are achieving that with extremely high quality, but small woofer drivers. This is where I think one can have problems creating "scale", if I understand what you mean by that word. In contrast, the Legacy models take a different approach, using larger woofers and much larger cabinets at similar price points.

I don't mean this to be a cut on Revel--as I said, they are very high quality speakers, and there are many other top tier manufacturers that produce speakers at similar price points with similar size cabinets. The thing is, the Focus 340 retail for $7500, which seems to me a bucket of money when I actually saw and heard them. I was really surprised at how small they actually are. Great speakers, but I'm not sure they are going to produce the sense of "scale" you're looking for.

For less $ than that, you can get the Legacy Signature HD, which includes dual ribbon tweeters and is rated down to 22Hz on the low end. If the Signature is too large, they also have the Classic, which is a bit smaller, but still goes down to 32Hz(+/-2dB). Deadalus and Selah are a couple other brands you may want to check out as well. There are just a bewildering number of speaker makers, so I know how frustrating it can be to figure out what to purchase.

Now that Sonus Faber's Olympica line has replaced their Cremona line, you can find lightly used Cremona M's (a $10K floorstander) in excellent condition for around $6K. There are two such A-gon listings right now (I have no affiliation with either of them). I think the Cremona M is a fabulous speaker, musical, articulate, detailed, and emotionally involving. It doesn't take a very expensive amp to bring them alive, either.

They are also drop-dead gorgeous, so there's a good chance that they'd have a high WAF as well.

Yes - please let me know what you're using for whole house surge protection. When my new gear comes in I was thinking of investing in PS Audio stuff. I don't want to trust it to my lower end Furman stuff.