nht vs cerwin vega

gregadd, thats a pretty lousey response, the guy didnt ask for us to evaluate his gear, he wants help makin the best of what he has & you run his gear in the dirt, way to go dude.

ill tell ya what, i can remember when i would of loved a pair of cerwin vega .

GMARCOTTE,work with what you have before thinking about lascalas, ive owned a ton of klipsch speakers & they too can be harsh.

if im reading your description correctly you are biamping the nht's with a tfm 15 on bottom & the rest of your power is supplied from the hk reciever & the mids & highs are too low to compete with the bass .

try turning down the gain on the carver & turn the volume up on the hk, you can also try just the power from the hk to run the nht's & see if that puts your sound more in sync.

experiment with what you have before doing any upgrades.

gmarcotte:
As Bigjow suggests, work with what you have. E-mail the people at Cerwin and ASK them about x-over modification to tame the sizzle.
As you suspect, the sound "imbalance" is x-over related and designed to be so.
Alternatively, check out a recent thread at AA -- "remember when CW were audiophile" or s/thing along those lines. Cheers

inscrutable, i suspected i may be loosing something in the mid bass region, i will go back to bi-amping with fullrange signal. at that point i could swap the sp wire at the speakers to give a full 100 watts to the mid-highs. ive been a little weary af just turning it up with no cliping indicater on the hk. i think i will also run the sp with just one amp like gregm suggested, both with the hk and then the carver only. thanks everybody for the comments!

Bigjoe-While I would like to make fun of a lot of equipment on Audiogon, I never do. Especially when it involves huge megabuck systems some of which in my experience sound like crap.
It was not clear from the original post that he owned this equipment. I thought he was contemplating a purchasing decision. It appears from his follow up post that he agrees that nht is a vastly superior speaker to cerwin vega for a hi-fi two channel system.
Furthermore saying that a speaker is designed for boom and sizzle is not necessarily an insult. An examination of how cerwin vega is marketed and where it is sold indictes it is directed toward the pop music market. It is no secret that recording engineers producing pop music bump up the bass and the high end. Thus for those who like this sound Cerwin Vega might be the preferred choice. Before dvd it was my experience that vhs hi-fi also followed this practice. Again making cerwin vega a good if not ideal choice. I had a boom and sizzle system when I was in college.

if it was just a question of ht, cw imho is a good choice due to low power amps in av recievers. no need to buy lots of amps and the subs are built in. if cw in not up to your standerds, klipsch should have something in their ref line that will need no more than 50 good watts. its what that first watt does that is important. for big sound in big rooms. ive been told the older cw with the 15 mated with 5 1000 wt mac monoblocks mades a pretty impreseve system. my wife did jump once when we were watching hero the other night, but when i had my re30 hooked to the front durring private ryan she was actually taking cover. just couldnt help but to think what it would be like with 5 of them. im shure 5 2.5i would sound good too just might need those mac mono blocks to do it