Everyone knows small speakers they want to sound big. I have never found any small speaker to actually foot the bill; small speaker = small sound. It's physics. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing bookshelves. It's just that a person isn't going to get a floorstander performance from a pint size speaker.
Take any line of speakers and move from the monitors to the floorstanders. Huge difference. One monitor in any given line might sound better than a floorstander in another line. I think that is often confused with considering the smaller speaker to sound "bigger."
But it seems to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to consider a 1 foot tall monitor as being up to the task to compete with a floorstander with x cubic feet more volume for bass. If they could actually GET the performance of the bigger speakers without building them bigger, we'd have no big speakers to buy! They'd all be the size of the Boze cubes. (That's not to say that someday technology may take us there. maybe.)
If I had the 1 square foot of floorspace, which most of us do, I wouldn't even dream of monitors (unless budget or WAF dictated) if I could have floorstanders. And, yes, I've owned several pair of monitors over the years. I don't think I'd ever go back. A small speaker is what it is, not what it isn't.
