speaker to big?

hte speaker i am currently using is a floorstander about 40 inches tall made by selah audio consisting of a ribbon tweater 5 1/2 inch midrange and 7 inch acutron woofer. speaker is non ported. i love the speakers and at moderate levels it sounds great but at loud levels the sound stage falls apart and things become a bit of a mess. i am on a tile floor withan area rug and this does not seem an ideal situation. the speakers are not under any strain so its not that they cant handle the volume level. which leads me to believe they are either too big and not being given enough space or my room needs to be toned down a bit.

"Loud levels" can be simply overdriving the room. Consider that the initial signals from the speakers are continually bouncing off walls, ceilings, etc, without sufficient opportunity to decay. This will destroy good 'imaging'.

You can help this some by deadening the room BUT then when you play music at normal levels it might sound a bit dead and uninvolving because you may have overdamped your room.

You've got good speakers - I doubt that they are a problem but it might be informative (to you) to have a SPL meter and test record and see exactly what your frequency response is. Knowing that might lead you to a solution, or not.

But, IMHO, if you want 'loud' and imaging you need a much larger room with better dimensions and very selective set up, including acoustic treatment of problem areas.

FWIW.

I have a room that is on the small side (13x15) and found the same thing -- at louder levels the room really got overloaded. But I got a RealTraps kit and the situation improved dramatically. I can play music as loud as I want now without problems. I still have some room issues -- bass seems to be emphasized more as I move my listening seat back within 2 feet of the wall. Not cheap, but the sound treatment was a lot cheaper than building another room.

would love to try maggie mg12's or mmg's.
Do they work at all well with tubes? once again my room is small and am using the prima luna dialogue. speakers would be placed as stated above

Panu21,

Curious on how much of your tile floor is covered by an area rug, and whether or not you have any padding under the rug? Also, what other furniture (couches, chairs, ect) and window treatments do you have in the room? Basically is the room sound hard or soft? Softening the room will allow you to play your music louder, but in general, small rooms and loud music don't really work very well, as you'll going to get overload issues. Something you might want to do is shoot Rick Craig of Selah an e-mail and explain your situation, perhaps there are some minor tweaks (and I'm thinking along the lines that maybe a resistor between the crossover and (+) terminal of the woofer might tone down it's output to a more acceptable level for your room) that you (or him) could do to your speakers that might help solve some of your problems.