new speakers/used/demo- 4K- 6K

audiokinises--how would i arrange home demo's of the lines you suggest. local dealers hold up a cross when they hear the words: "home demo" i am in miami, fl 33133. i would not feal comfortable w/o a local "in shop demo" first; and after i kick some tires first, then i'm ready to talk about home demo's before a final decision. i respect the time and the investment that an audio salon has in its business and would not want to put someone out w/o me being relatively sure about what i'm doing. i don't demo speakers for a hobby. music is what helps me keep my sanity in this crazy, streesful world. good sound works much more effectively than recreational controled substances--unfortuneately the are both very expensive.
bob

Bob -

I understand your desire to kick the tires first, via an in-store audition. That makes a lot of sense, and I'd want the same thing.

Since I'm in New Orleans and the commute from Miami just isn't practical, what I think would make sense is for you and I to get to know each other over the phone first. I'm e-mailing you my phone number. From this point, once I get a better feel for what would fit your needs, and you get a better feel for what I have to offer, IF we both think I have something extremely promising to offer, we can arrange for you to audition the speaker in-home, splitting the shipping on some equitable basis. I can tell that you wouldn't want to waste my time, nor would I want to waste yours, so if we don't conclude that I have something extremely promising, hopefully we'll count ourselves the richer for having gotten to know a fellow audiophile, and save each other time & money by not going through with the demo. And for my part, if something I don't sell seems to me to be a potentially equal or better match than what I do sell, I'll let you know. I pride myself on being a hobbyist first and a dealer second.

My website is a bit out of date, but you can go there and get a little better feel for my approach. www.audiokinesis.com.

One last thing - you wrote that "music is what helps me keep my sanity in this crazy, stressful world." Yesss! Music can completely change the energy in a room or a home, and music well reproduced can go beyond entertaining and become transformational. You mentioned recreational controlled substances - another analogy would be deep meditation, which takes a great deal of mental discipline. Music can take you to the same place, but it does so effortlessly.

One other possibility occurs to me - with those powerful amps, you could drive a pair of Sound Lab Millennium-3 full-range electrostats. This is Sound Lab's smallest full-range model. The only issue would be the size of the speakers, but Sound Labs are legendary for their world-class inner harmonic detail and natural timbre.

Since the Sound Labs approximate a line source rather than a point source, they have a certain characteristic that makes them especially well suited for large rooms: The sound pressure level falls off more gradually with distance than it does for a conventional speaker. This sets up a sound-field that just "feels" more like what one experiences at a concert. In my room, for example, a point-source loudspeaker's output falls off by 11 dB as you move back from 1 meter to 8 meters, but the output of the Sound Labs only falls off by 4 dB over the same distance.

Now, if you're looking for very high volume levels, the Sound Labs aren't for you - they're definitely a finesse speaker, a quality-over-quantity speaker. But they do some things probably better than anything else out there, and some of those things just happen to be among your priorities.

These smaller Sound Labs are easier to ship than their big brothers, and in a week or two I'd be able to offer you an in-home audition on a pair.

Make certain you audition the Piega before buying any other speakers. I'll agree some of the planars are wonderful in some applications but I challange any to compare with the ribbon technology offered in the Piega. This is truly an all around speaker not limited to certain types of amps, rooms ,or music. 19 hz bass and extension to 47.5 k. Listen and compare. I believe if Duke Laguine from Audiokinesis,one of our old customers, heard the Piega set up in his system he would agree. What say you Duke?