Oaklore -
One of the problems encountered when you have to position the speakers close to the "front" wall and/or side walls is that you tend to put a lot of bass energy into the room's natural resonant modes. This makes it very difficult to get accurate bass because energy is stored and slowly released by these room resonant modes. Often you end up with a chesty, overemphazised midbass and a fairly deep but somewhat lumpy bass. The result can be impressive, but is seldom natural-sounding.
There is a bass loading technique that minimizes the amount of low frequency energy put into the room's resonant modes. That technique is dipole loading, which is usually reserved for planars. A dipole has a figure-8 radiation pattern in the bass, instead of an omnidirectional pattern. The result is 5 dB less bass in the reverberant field for a given on-axis bass sound pressure level because there is very little energy put out into the room's side-to-side and up-and-down resonant modes - only the front-to-back resonant mode is strongly excited. An added benefit of a dipole is the lack of internal cabinet pressures and cabinet colorations. So the bass has much better pitch definition and is much more natural sounding.
Now a dipole is not going to work well in the midrange in your room because the wall behind the speakers is too close - the soundstaging will be poor and you won't get the openness dipoles are famous for. So a planar speaker isn't going to work well for you. Alas, I sell some nice planars.
Now, what if there was a speaker that had dipole bass but monopole midrange and highs? What if this speaker also had very well controlled radiation patterns (an important hidden factor in long-term listening enjoyment - details if you'd like)? What if this speaker soundstages very well and sounds very natural from virtually any position in the room because the midbass and bass aren't at the mercy of the room boundaries?
This speaker is called the Gradient Revolution. The active version (which is the upgrade path) was among the most natural-sounding systems at CES 2001, and was the most natural sounding in the bass of any system in a small room. Check it out at http://www.gradient.fi/En/index.htm . For the record I'm on the verge of becoming a Gradient dealer, but I'd recommend this speaker for your application even if I wasn't (which I have many times, over at the Asylum).
