Hey all. I have considered hawking all my speakers and going with an all new lineup. I currently run psb's(as my personals show). My amp is Rotel 985, pre is H/K avr 65. Pioneer dvd/savd, use is mostly music, lots of live concert stuff. Turntable is Dual 515 with Ortofon 20 cartridge, though all my vinyl is old, old. Like well used Queen 'anight at the opera' type stuff. I have a budget, but wont tell, say under 3000cdn, 2600 usd$. I think I know where this will lead from some folks here, but I want to see what happens. The room now is long and lean, 18wx30lx8'ceiling(ceiling in wood)
Opinions?
btw, my drum kit is away in the studio corner, and the music is played rather loudly at times.
my bias is towards magnepans which you could easily buy in that budget.
i was a diehard acoustic suspension minimonitor (old school infinity LOL) fan for 20 years until $1200pr. maggies took my breath away with their lightning fast speed and total unboxy coherent midrange that made vocals sound eerily realistic.
if you're a drummer and hate how much big ported woofers make bass drums sound sluggish, you'll love the incridible speed that maggies hit bass notes. they are a little bit polite in the bass range in the smaller models at least, but you can clearly hear every detail. the bass guitar and drum won't blur into an indistinct "whum whum whum" LOL
i liked the sound of the $1200 maggies with similarly priced gear more than $20K B&Ws with another $40K worth of mcintosh gear for their lighning fast midrange and "unspeakerlike" sound.
the B&Ws had deeper bass, more treble extension and imaged better, but the maggies were jaw dropping in their speed and freedom from distortion. they just sounded more "real" to me.
if you could just budget $3750 for the magnaplanar 3.6s you'd get maggies with the most treble extension (25K i think) they make.
maggies will play pretty loud and still sound clear, but they are power hungry and will fry any amp not rated into 4 ohms. they're recommended for 100WPC minimum.
on the cheaper end, i'd go for $500 pair MMGs instead as they actually have more treble (if not bass) extension than their next two bigger brothers and as smaller speakers, probably image more precisely.
a REALLY good investment for your system aside from speakers would be the benchmark media systems DAC 1 d/a converter whic gets MANY raves EVERYWHERE and is class A rated by stereophile ($1,000) you could get even better sound driving your amps directly and bypassing your preamp and driving the amp with the d/a as it includes a volume control and headphone jack.
not only that... but when your DVD player eventually bites it, you can still get sound that rivals mark levinson etc. from a $50 CD or DVD player. the DAC eats jitter and destroys it.
i had a recommendation for a VPI turntable and rega rb300 tonearm combo, but VPI no longer makes the butt kicking $600 table anymore. their cheapest one is the $900 scout.
clearaudio has a nice lucite $900 table/arm combo.
i envy your budget. before i sell all of my vinyl, i'll be digitizing it with a cheesy technics direct drive table, audio technica cartridge (i still think J&R switched the line contact stylus out!) and either an onkyo or NAD phono preamp.
the other way to go with your vinyl would be to invest in a good a/d converter for your PC, digitize your vinyl (24/96 even?) and clean it up with a decent noise filter. i've been playing around with an awesome freeware program called audacity (fairly deep multitrack recorder w/effects etc.) which lets me zoom in on tics and pops and just redraw them out of the waveform. some are hard to find in busy mixes and it takes hours to clean a song up, but it's free. you can get a decent program that can clean most of the noise for as little as $50.
the only part of my system i'd put up against your CURRENT system is my giant killing NHT superzeros. LOL