Bookshelf Bake Off
Fellow Audiogoners,
Lend me your ears. I live on a farm in South Georgia and have a 3+ hour drive in any direction to audition anything. The price I pay for land, peace and horses I suppose. I am putting together a secondary system and can't audition everything I have interest in, so I am hoping you can help me shorten the short list to a manageable set of maybe three (two would be even better) auditions for bookshelf speakers. They will be driven by 2 x PS Audio M700 Monoblocks, Schiit Freya+ tube preamp and a Mytek Brooklyn DAC+. The space is fairly small at approx. 10'x20'. For a number of reasons, floorstanders are not a possibility, hence the call for bookshelf speakers. I would like to keep the budget in the $2K range, +/- a reasonable %. I am not someone that feels the need to max the budget, i.e. linear correlation of price and quality, so feel free to suggest high value brands/models less than the max budget. I have a pair of Focal Aria 906 in another system and very much like their sound, but want something a bit warmer with similar (or better) resolution. Deeper low frequency extension would be a plus. The brands I have narrowed the field to are:
Revel
Legacy
KEF
Monitor Audio
Sonus Fabre
PSB
This list is not written in stone, just my initial list after research. Feel free to suggest anything I have omitted that warrants consideration. Thanks in advance for your ears.
Mark