I’d take The Music over a Salon 2 any day. Not sure what VA speakers you heard, but if you need a speaker to play louder, you probably have bad hearing loss, or are expecting too much out of a speaker for the given room size.
CTFD.
The Beethovens were the best sounding speakers i've owned, but with 200/8 and 325/4 wpc Krell kav 300 il they struggled to achieve 95 spl in my listening room. Revel f52 with the same power would play much more dynamically at concert level and image tighter, but still 2 dimensional while the engineers at VA seem to be the best yet at reproducing individual sounds in space. So while most of my music listening is at or under 90db I occasionally need to 'rock out' and when I had the beethovens I would swap out my kef 105/3's to boogie to, now I want a Vienna acoustics speaker that sounds as awesome as the beethovens without it's spl restrictions.
CTFD.
The Beethovens were the best sounding speakers i've owned, but with 200/8 and 325/4 wpc Krell kav 300 il they struggled to achieve 95 spl in my listening room. Revel f52 with the same power would play much more dynamically at concert level and image tighter, but still 2 dimensional while the engineers at VA seem to be the best yet at reproducing individual sounds in space. So while most of my music listening is at or under 90db I occasionally need to 'rock out' and when I had the beethovens I would swap out my kef 105/3's to boogie to, now I want a Vienna acoustics speaker that sounds as awesome as the beethovens without it's spl restrictions.