I need to be wowed

A couple of things bother me here. First, your constraints about speaker placement. Given the number of dollars you already have invested and the additional dollars you are prepared to invest, I'd strongly urge you to be more flexible about speaker placement. Please forgive me if I sound condescending--truly I do not mean to be--but it is a measure of your inexperience that you are prepared to say, "They have to be placed RIGHT HERE and no place else." It comes down to how badly you want good sound. In the interest of optimum speaker placement, I have seen speakers placed in traffic flow patterns so that everyone had to learn to step around them, etc. In my current situation, one of my speakers extends halfway into a doorway--AND the door is covered with ugly Sonex. Inconvenient as hell but I paid $15K for the speakers and I'm sure gonna put them where they sound best.

Speaker placement is absolutely CRITICAL to getting what you say you want. Whether it is a matter of convenience, aesthetics, SAF, or whatever, I'd try to work it through.

Secondly, please do make every possible--even superhuman--effort to audition in your home. Even if it means renting a truck to haul them back and forth a hundred miles there simply is no other way to determine how speakers will sound in your space until you put them there and spend some days experimenting and listening.

If all this sounds extreme....well, audiophilia IS a disease, after all, and you definitely seem to have the early symptoms. :)

Good luck!

agree with bishopwill. Correctly placed $1k speakers can image far, far better than poorly placed $5k speakers.

See these two links for hints :
http://www.cardas.com/insights/roomsetup.html
http://www.audiophysic.de/produkte/aufstellung/aufstellung_e2.html
(they're both in english).
Again it's a trade off between musicality and aesthetics (since optimum sonic placement is usually rather non-optimal aesthetically), but the difference in sound quality is profound.

I absolutely agree about placement..believe me....I can even hear the difference in an inch or two..
however, if you look at my room photos...there really is no way to alter placement...give or take a feet inches...
As I have the speakers right now the spiral staircase has only necessary clearance..any further out and you'd literally have to climb over the speakers to get upstairs...
.I even thought about reversing the room even though it'd be bizarre, but the only two pieces of furniture
wouldn't fit...
I'm really nor being inflexible for aesthetic reasons....it's just not possible to reposition...
I'd really love to...!
As for home audition....I will try...that's my biggest fear...that with these 22' high ceilings...nothing will sound
the same as in a demo room...
I didn't find the remark condescending...just passionate...and that's a language I understand.
Thanks,Bishop and Will!

Greetings, ah, "Dudette",

I recognize you from your room photos, if nothing else.

The Shahinians and Vandersteens and Spendors mentioned make sense to me from a voicing standpoint; but the Thiels and Martin Logans and Dunlavy's would not, in my opinion, be likely winners for you. If the Shahinians would work in that location they'd be excellent, but I'm not sure about positioning them that close to the wall. Such wide dispersion speakers tend to be quite demanding of speaker placement, but then quite forgiving of listener placement.

I have not heard the Naim speakers mentioned, but they might be an excellent choice if that wall right behind them significantly reinforces the bottom end. You see, I can't judge from here whether or not it really does - those huge openings to either side of the speaker probably reduce the amount of bass lift you get. So I have a question for you -

When you move your speakers out from the wall, does the bass and midbass lighten up considerably? Or does the tonal balance stay pretty much the same?

If the bass and midbass lighten up considerably when you move your speakers out, then you probably want speakers that are voiced to sound good close to a wall, like the Gradients or perhaps the Naims. If the bass and midbass stay pretty much the same, then I'd suggest the Vandy's or Spendors or maybe Shahinians. Hey, the Shahinians can be painted, if necessary.

Let me comment a bit on the bass tuning to explain why it makes a difference whether the speaker is designed to be placed near a wall or not.

Suppose a speaker is designed to be flat to 35 Hz in an anechoic chamber. Now put that speaker out in the middle of a room, and it will sound pretty good down to the mid 30's. But put it close to the rear wall and bring a sidewall into the picture, and the bass is boosted so that it's up maybe 3-6 dB in its lower region, say between 30 and 40 Hz. This speaker will now sound tubby and sluggish in the bass, and the midbass may be chesty and thickened as well.

Now suppose instead we tuned the same speaker to be flat down to only 45 Hz, but then to gently roll off so that at 27 Hz it's only maybe 6 dB down. If we put this speaker close to the wall, the bass will now go down to 27 Hz or so without peaking, and retain good transient response and natural midbass. This is the kind of bass tuning the Gradient Evidence uses, and it sounds very good in practice. Acutally, the tuning of the Evidence can be adjusted via jumpers so that it sounds natural either close to the wall or out a bit. But the Evidence would not be an ideal speaker for way-out-in-the-room placement.

The coolest thing about the Evidence is its mid/tweet module, which uses the same cardioid loading as the mid/tweet module of the Revolution (it's the same unit, just not in a separate enclosure). This cardioid radiation pattern puts out virtually no energy towards the rear, so there is essentially nothing to be reflected off of the rear wall above 200 Hz. Virtually all other speakers are going to reflect a significant amount of midrange energy off the rear wall because monopole woofers and midranges have a pretty much spherical radiation pattern in the midbass and midrange region (up to maybe 1 kHz or so). So as far as eliminating midrange reflections off the rear wall, the Gradient Evidence and Revolution are pretty much unique in their price ranges. And the Evidence's voicing is like the Revolution's - very relaxing and non-aggressive. No hot tweeters here. By the way, I checked and the Evidence does come in black.

Here's the link to the propaganda page for the Evidence. Be sure to go to the second and third pages of the link - the third page in particular has cool information about optimizing the bass tuning. And, for more information on the cardioid-loaded mid/tweet, look at the Revolution pages also. Evidence page: http://www.gradient.fi/En/Products/Evidence/Evid1.htm

I absolutely agree that you've got to have an in-home audition to be sure you're making the right choice. I think the stuff I sell would probably work for you, but there's really only one way to find out.

So anyway if you have a chance, please check out the effect on the tonal balance of placing the speakers right up against that wall, and then of pulling them out about three or four feet, just so we have an idea of how much bass lift you will be getting, because that really needs to be factored in to make a good recommendation from here.

Best of luck to you in your quest, intrepid Dudette!

One thing I noticed looking at your room photos was not only the front wall height of your ceiling, but the angle at which it comes back down toward the listening position. If I am seeing it correctly, the angle is approaching something like 45 degees, with the height at the back wall being close to normal 8 ft. This means the first reflection point for the sound off the ceiling is almost over your head, instead of half the distance between the listener and the speaker, as with a normal flat ceiling. This in turn implies of much shallower degree of off-axis positioning of the reflection point relative to the speaker's higher-frequency drivers, which could be affecting the spectral content of the reflection. Since speakers are voiced to sound correct with conventional ceilings - insofar as their dispersion roll-off characteristics will affect the perceived balance of direct/reflected sound - I am theorizing that your ceiling configuration could be unduly brightening the resulting tonal balance. If true, this would point toward some kind of acoustical treatment for your ceiling first-reflection point as a remedy. I may be in over my head with this idea (bad pun!), but it seems to make sense, so maybe consulting with someone qualified in acoustic design before doing anything would be indicated. Good luck!