Best speakers ever 4 small room?

In my opinion, the dipoles on your list are quite likely to work well. I have customers who have used very large dipoles in rooms smaller than yours and been very happy. You'd need to diffuse the backwave in the interest of good image depth.

Dipole bass doesn't have the impact of bass from a box, but often has better pitch definition and many people think it sounds more natural.

Another type of speaker that works well in a small room is a monopole with a well-controlled radiation pattern to minimize early sidewall reflections. In this category would come horn-based speakers small enough to integrate well at fairly close range, single-driver speakers, and coaxials. You want to minimize early sidewall reflections because those are the ones most detrimental to imaging. Using diffusion at the first sidewall reflection zones helps. Try to avoid using absorption any more than you have to, as particularly in small rooms too much absorption sucks the life out of the sound by killing the reverberant field.

You specifically mentioned "subtle natural sounding bass that's deep and accurate and projects depth." That delicious sense of enormous acoustic space that well-reproduced stereo bass can provide is largely generated by a phase difference between the bass signals arriving at the left and right ears. The phase differential in a recording with true stereo bass is best reproduced by stereo subwoofers located to the extreme left and right of the listening position.

I have avoided making specific suggestions here because many (though not all) of the speakers I'd suggest are ones I peddle. Finding speakers that work with, rather than against, small room acoustics is something I've put a high priority on. Shoot me an e-mail if you'd like some specific suggstions (and don't worry they won't all be stuff I sell).

Duke

My friend Clemment Perry, has a room only a little bigger than yours, and he has Dali Megalines with two gigantic outboard suwoofers! He has used very careful room tunning using passive devices and he also uses a TACT room correction system.

There are a number of ways to deal with this problem:

One is too carefully match the bass output and placement of the speakers with the room. A combination of subwoofer and monitors works splendidly, as you can adjust the output level and placement o the sub to give you the smoothest bass response.

Two: is to go digital room correction ala Tact along with the above or any other speakers, and additional room tuning.

Three: Get a Rives designed room with passive bass control.

Clemment's system is amazing and works remarkably well in a sub-optimally sized room, so the proof is in the putting.

I would choose the speaker which works well in the room as well as the sound that you love. To give you some guidance a speaker with many multiple drivers will usually need a lot of space to sound coherent. A Line array like the Dali's works well in such a room because the drivers are coherent across a wide frequency and the radiation pattern is a dipole in the upper octaves which makes such a tall speaker less room dependent than many others.

Large horns, and Full range Planers tend to need a lot of breathing space. The JM Labs Diva is a good choice for you room, =also the Magico Mini's are quite good. Wilson's tend to have a way too powerful kicked up bass which makes them better for slightly bigger rooms, the MBL's tend to work much better in bigger rooms as well due to their omni-directional designs.

A couple of my favorites for this room:

The Dali MS 4 is a wonderful speaker tremendous resolution, sweet midrange and tight but not too deep bass response and a true reference speaker which is a sleeper.

We just got in the Mark and Daniel Maximus Monitors which in a word is incredible, simply incredible speakers! We are waiting to hear more from this company but the bass is extremely tight with a stunning treble clarity and presence and they seem to work well in smaller rooms. They also offer a omni directional tweeter add on to give you some of the spacial effects of the MBL. This is a company to watch and very reasonably priced one caveat they need lots of juice.

The Escalante Pinyon and Uinta package is quite impressive and very easy to tune. The Kharmas are very good and work well in smaller rooms as well. You should be able to come up with plenty to listen to.

A pair of Audio Note AN/E can take you all the way to more money you want to spend (with all the different versions ranging from $3,000 to over $100,000 for the Sogon model)and a sound both full range (18 Hz, -6dB) and subtle-delicate-transparent. Best of all, their High Efficiency models can be driven with less than 10wpc of pure SET unlike other full range models or some exquisite monitors that require much more power. And they look great in a simple way with exquisite finishes.

18 Hz (6 Db down), 95 db efficiency, in a reasonably small box using an 8" woofer? I'm intrigued by this. How are they able to do this and no one else, apparently, can? There are 15" subwoofers that cannot achieve 18 Hz, how is Audio Note doing it with a woofer half that size?

Something isn't right...

-RW-

Totem Mani - 2.