Help - new house - new setup?

My thinking is that the best system is the one that sounds the best to you. I can't get overly concerned about the high ceiling absent that issue, the guy just wants to build a system he will like. I say start with whatever loudspeaker you like that is appropriate for the floor dimensions given there being open adjacent areas balconies and a vey high ceiling. Then buy an amp or amps to drive them that you like and then get a really nice pre-amp. Decide what sources you want to use possibly before the pre if you are going to want to use a built in phono stage. Happy hunting, auditioning and system building, it may take a while.

First things first. No matter how nice the speaker placement in your previous home was, it is entirely irrelevant to what will work in the new place. You need to experiment quite a bit with speaker and listening chair placement. This could be random trial and error or use of some systemmatic methodology (google "Wilson" or "Sumiko" method). If you go with some kind of placement calculation, you will still need to actually do a lot of experimenting.

A room with a nearly square floorplan tends to be problematic, and the high ceiling makes it worse. High ceilings tend to suck the life out of the sound. Still, I have heard very large rooms with high ceilings sound surprisingly good when the speakers were properly placed.

In rooms like this, multiple subwoofers make sense. The use of two or more subwoofers is not to get more bass (most subwoofers can deliver excessive quantities of bass to almost ANY room), but to achieve more uniform bass coverage.

I am less enamoured with the idea of going with bigger speakers for higher sound pressure levels. While I am a fan of big speakers (I like certain horn systems), I particularly enjoy listening at quite low sound levels. Quality, not quantity matters most to me. If you try to overcome the dead sound of your setup with higher volume level, you could make the contribution of destructive room reflections and resonance worse. I would try moving the listening seat closer to the speakers (and move the speakers farther away from the side walls), to make the setup more of a near-field setup; this decreases the contribution of the room to the sound. It is a "free" experiment.

Good luck and I hope everything works out.

Larry
thanks for that advice.

I will certainly try that.

Have you tried running the Audyssey speaker setup software that comes with the Marantz? I suggest that you run the setup on full auto and then analyze the results to look for any clues or anomalies it finds as it runs thru the various tests. If possible, try to find a PC program to help the analysis. There are many on the market that can help you understand your room better based on the setup data. What you learn can then be used to guide you towards making the right decisions rather than just throwing money at it.

Understanding your new room's acoustic properties could make it your finest "component". I would love to have that room!

MvBuddah,
thanks for that advice.

I am trying different speaker and equipment positions this weekend and will then rerun audyssey.