Bookshelf speaker ideas....

moverbob,
in the studio line of paradigm's, they are on v.5. to my understanding, studio v.4's use the same tweeter, different midbass. the studio line is still made in canada, as are the signature line. the monitor line is now made in china. the difference between the monitor series and the studio series is fairly substantial in my oppinion. i feel that the studio line is far more musical. you need to look at the sensitiviy rating of a speaker to determine how well a lower powered amp like yours will play them. the studio 20's need some power to sound good, so your onkyo may not do the trick. i didn't think about zu audio, but now that i have, you might want to look into them. a while back they were offering zu omen standard's for 1,000. these are awesome speakers, built by cool people who care. the zu speakers are also incredibly efficient, meaning that your onkyo will push them without a problem. my vote would be to start checking out some zu's :-)

The Sjofn CLUE is tantalizing in the limited reviews I can read, and Mr. Erickson sent me a personal reply to my email of inquiry. He chose not to compare the CLUE to the other speakers I am considering, but only to higher end speakers like the Magico Mini! Said that nothing anywhere near the CLUE's price can touch it. Is is for real? Is the CLUE really THAT amazing? I'd need to order it with free money back guarantee to find out, because nobody close to me carries it....If it's that great, why isn't there more ink (or cyber-ink?!) about it?

moverbob, the sjofn clue seems to need quite a powerful amp as they have a very low sensitivity rating (86 db). In the reviews, they were hooked up to some pretty serious equipment. Alot of $1500 monitors sound good with $10,000 worth of equipment upstream. The zu's should sound pretty decent, and loud, with only 55 watts, and if later on you upgrade the rest of your system, they'll sound even better. My vote still goes to zu in this particular application :-)

LOL Well now that I'm really getting into it and learning a lot about how to get the best sound, it seems that a new amp may be in order, although maybe my old Onkyo will be OK. Question remains: with a decent amp, would the Clue beat out the Excite X12? That's what I've narrowed it down to...

I like dynaudio quite a bit, but I'm curious about the clue's. Maybe you ought to start a new thread "clue vs. excite" it'd be interesting to see if anyone has heard the clue's and what they thought about them. I like the idea of their placement as you could gain alot of width to the soundstage in a small room.