What makes a speaker too big for a given room?

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.

I think monitors are also much easier to integrate into a small to medium size room. You can control the height of the drivers as well which varies with listening position and room size and ear level which is hard to do with most towers as they are fixed in one large cabinet which is heavy and would look silly on stands.

IMO, monitors do the disappearing thing better, have a higher WAF, choose the type of stands you like (style, material, brand, size). In general are better looking and have fewer compromises built into them. Bass below 35Hz no big deal to me. Very little in musical audio.

I would also think that big speakers in a small room take up a lot of acoustic space and interfere in a not quite predictable way with the sound they themselves try to make.
So I would say that this is not a good idea. Now how big is too big?