Big, big room -- which 10-20k speakers?

How far will the speakers be from the back wall?

If 4' or more, I saw some used Genesis 200's (dipole hybrids) listed but they have the older-style Carver ribbons. Serenity Acoustics is a brand new venture that displayed at RMAF with the OB/servo sub Super 7's but I don't think they even have a website yet.

How far from the speakers would be your listening position?

If more than 15', maybe line arrays like http://angelcityaudio.com/products/gr-research/
Saw some used LS9's listed on audiocircle.

Don't under-estimate that Luxman.

you need giant speakers most of the products mentioned can not fill a room of that size sufficiently, and it is not a matter of just efficiency it is of bass response and the ability to move a huge column of air, other issues will be of limiting echo and reflection.

A pair of Maxx or other similar sized speakers will do it.

The Salons, Aerials, are not big enough. The Avante Gardes are a good but can sound shouty and are super fussy.

Salks won't do it either, Tyler you can never hear and have O resale value, as with other home brew speaker companies.

The Classic speakers don't have the resolution.

Yeah, I tend to agree with the idea that if your seriously sticking with that gear?....well, don't bother going down the road with that speaker list! To truly eek out the performance from them you will need tons of cash beyond just the speakers to make them sing properly. Serious;y, look into the JBL arrays perhaps for some ass kicking fun with the power you have now.

Audiooracle, I agree that a lot of the speakers won’t be able to fill a large room, but I don’t think the Salks are in that category. At the 2010 RMAF the Salks were in the Iris ballroom. Steve Stone of TAS said they were the best sound of the show and they were playing a lot of orchestral music.

Bob

The Classic speakers don't have the resolution.

This is a load of bull. The Classic Audio keeps up with any of them. Its beryllium midrange field-coil driver is very fast, relaxed and revealing. The speaker uses Mundorf caps in the crossover with 6db slopes.

You need to do the math. You have a big room, and speakers with moderate efficiency (89-93 db) will not fit the bill with any integrated I know of, not if you want to fill the room with anything that sounds like real music. So if the speaker has less than 96 db I would strike it from the list, unless you feel like getting a 500 watt amplifier to drive them, because that is what you are going to need with speakers of lower efficiency.

For example, if you have a speaker of 91 db and a 500-watt amp, you will be able to play at exactly the same levels with a 125-watt amp if the speaker is 97 db. The reason is because our ears work on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear scale. So to get 3 db increase in volume requires double the amplifier power. 3 db is not a lot! 10 db sounds like it is twice as loud, but that takes 10X more power.

If you were using a smaller room this would be easy. But the advantage of a large room is that the virtual size of the musicians becomes life-like in the sound field- something you can't do in a small room. So you need a speaker with the bandwidth, resolution and efficiency. Most decent speakers have two of those three attributes. The reason I am an advocate of the Classic Audio Loudspeaker is that it has all three. So does the Audiokinesis Dreammaker, although it is slightly less efficient, it is still more efficient than most speakers mentioned so far.

The problem you are going to run into with speakers of lower efficiency is that by the time you get the life-like levels, you are going to be pushing the speaker pretty hard and its going to do some compression. Plus you can count the number of musical natural sounding amps that make 500 watts or more on one hand with fingers left over, price no object. That is why when you get into situations like this there is the expression 'gold-plated decibels'.

Go with a more efficient speaker and this will get a lot easier!