What makes a speaker too big for a given room?

Some explanations never make se.se to me, here is my question. If I have a monitor speaker with a added sub I get 20hz full range bass, now I can also get a 5ft tall full range floor model that in itself goes to 20hz. Now if my room is considered small people will say go with my first option and may say NEVER consider option 2. But 20hz is 20hz right? So why is one idea too big and other isnt??

I have a question similar to the one posed by Chadnliz. What is the difference in performance between a full range floorstanding speaker and a monitor speaker from the same model line that has the same tweeters and mid range drivers, used with a seperate sub? Is one setup one 'better' than the other. Pros and cons?

Chadnliz,

What you're saying makes just about perfect sense on paper...

With a sub, you can adjust the crossover and volume output to balance out the amount of bass in the room. With a tower, you can't. Maybe if you had an equalizer, you could decrease lower frequency outputs, but they aren't as specific in frequency and they almost always do more harm than good.

I've lived with speakers that were too big for a room. My PSB Image T55s were overbearing in a 12x10 room I had them in at one point. The bass drowned out pretty much everything else. It had an odd echo effect to it too. In a much larger and open room, they sounded very well balanced. I've heard this at a few dealers' shops too. Can't figure out why someone would buy the speakers based on a demo like that, but to each their own I guess.

Chadnliz and Rok2id, one answer to your question is that if you are listening to acoustically produced music, the vast majority of musicians will tell you that subs simply don't sound natural, no matter how well integrated. I have yet to hear one that does, myself. So for us, it is full-range floorstanders, and the subs are not an option, unless we want them for a separate home theater system. There is extremely little acoustic music that goes below 40hZ, let alone 20, so unless you want to accurately reproduce say the lowest organ pipe, a sub is simply not necessary, and is in fact quite detrimental to timbre. A whole bunch of folks here don't like that sort of talk, though... :)

Learsfool: Thanks. I was hoping that was the answer.