Speakers for a small room

I recently purchased a pair of Ascend Acoustics CBM-170 SE , and I am very happy with the sound of these speakers in my small living room. They are efficient and have great mid range and non sibilant highs.They can be purchased online for $298 a pair plus shipping and are nicely built.

No ATCs (not even the SCM7) will give their best with only 30w behind them. You'd want something closer to 90db sensitivity, I'd think. Maybe a slim floorstander would suit. I'd go to take your amp to some dealers and listen to various things with those kind of specs.

Just thought of a niche speaker that should mate excellently with your Pass amp cause they're always demo'd with low power tubes - the Living Voice Auditorium series. So musical. 94db sensitivity. Thinking like the OBX-RW and down the range. https://livingvoice.eu/en/page/products

I am digging up this old thread of mine to post an update. I have come to the conclusion that my room nodes are severely affecting my enjoyment and resulting in some compromises. When my speakers are brought out into the room (approx 4 ft or so) I get a great wide soundstage and on most tracks, the speakers do that disappearing thing. However, I lose impact, not necessarily bass but impact. This is a bit hard to explain but it goes something like this... strings don't have weight and now just sound like a string instead of being a string. So to add a bit more weight I can push the speakers further back and closer to the wall. There seems to be this magic zone in my room where if the speakers are put the bass becomes VERY boomy and muddy and drowns out the detail on the top end. This annoyance happens anywhere less than 4ft to 2ft from the wall. Needless to say, I can not place the speakers in this location so my other option is approx 1-2ft away from the wall. In this zone, there is weight to guitar strings (thanks to the rear firing port) but the soundstage collapses and it is very obvious that I am listening to two speakers. After months of playing with a quarter inch here and a quarter inch there I have come to the conclusion that my room nodes will not allow me to enjoy tower speakers. There is an obvious place in my room where bass and weight works best and an obvious place in my room where details shine. Unfortunately, I can not pull my speakers into two pieces and put one half in one part of the room and one half in the other. I do have room treatments, some acoustic panels, diffusion behind my equipment and corner bass traps as well as a rug on top of my vinyl floor. It doesn't help that my rear and side wall are basement walls which have a foundation behind them. Regardless of the arrangement of the panels and the arrangement of my speakers I can not get the sound to be "right" (good weight and good detail). After all of this I believe the direction that I need to head in is stand-mounts (such as a dynaudio special 40) and a rel sub such as the t5i or t7i. The advantage to this approach would be I can put the speakers in the location where details will sound the best and I can put the rel sub in the location where bass and weight performs the best. If need be I can even turn the sub down a fair bit to not aggravate the room nodes too much. What are your thoughts on this? Is there something else I should try before I up and sell my speakers and move to stand mounts + sub? 

@ostrey93 Not sure i would call a room that is 11x16x7'10" as small! That is a fairly good size...and has reasonable volume.
Nonetheless, I think you are probably on the right track with stand mounts and a couple of REL Subs. Take a look at my system picture and you can see how I deal with a much smaller room with that kind of a set-up.