Spend your $100 on a few good books about room acoustics and the rest on buying the supplies that you'll need to treat the room. Room treatment not only benefits system linearity, the sonic presentation will become more enjoyable.
There is something that should be said here that many folks may not realize. That is, an acoustically treated room that was not designed from the ground up will only be QUIETER than an untreated room in terms of total spl. Having said that, you may find yourself listening at louder levels in a treated room than an untreated room. That's because the presentation is both more enjoyable and linear in amplitude over a wider bandwidth. As such, max spl and average listening spl are not the same thing.
Outside of the speaker / room interphase, you probably don't have enough power to drive the Request's with authority. You are talking about a speaker that is rated at 87 dB's with 1 watt in and a 4 ohm load. Don't be fooled by ML's "bogus" rating of 90 dB's as it was spec'd with 2 watts of drive fed into the speakers ( 2.83 volts @ 4 ohms is two watts, not one ). If you do the math, you need gobs more power. Yes, i did say GOBS more power. Even if you did have the power available, you are using a speaker that is displacement limited and not suited for high volume listening sessions. Most E-stat's were never intended to reproduce sustained spl's.
If you do some checking, i think that you'll find that people that purchase "panel" type speakers end up changing musical tastes in a relatively short period of time. That is, music that has a high average power level ( rock, hard blues, etc... ) doesn't sound as good to them as it used to. Sure, the music still sounds phenomenally crisp and detailed, but it lacks the "drive" that gives that type of music its' energy. As such, they start listening to music that caters to the presentation / spl levels that these type of speakers work best with. That's why you'll probably hear more acoustic, jazz, classical, etc.. type music coming out of these speakers than "rock" or high spl HT presentations. This is true even though the owner may have been quite a bit more of a "rocker" when they initially purchased this type of speaker. Acoustic, jazz and classical are all basically transient in nature, which better suits the limited displacement capabilities of a panel speaker.
While you have a dynamic woofer to take some of the strain off of the panels in terms of excursion / displacement limitations, you're still running out of power. Combine the two distortions ( amplifier smear and speaker break-up ) with the effects of an untreated room and i don't doubt that you're running into problems. My guess is that most of the people that frequent this forum and others like it are in very much the same boat, but may not even realize it. Then again, we all use our systems differently and expect different things out of them, so high spl linearity and cohesiveness may not matter to many of them. Sean
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