Bookshelf or Tower

My room is about 15' by 30' with lots of wood furniture in it and tile floors. It is a combo dining/living room and has vaulted ceilings to an 11' peak.

I plan on auditioning speakers this Friday and the shop is a big B&W and Paradigm dealer so I should be able to listen to PM1's and 800 series and all the Signature Paradigm's too.

I like the idea of book shelves just because 70 lb towers are a beast to move around and from what I have been reading the smaller bookshelf cabinets give better imaging which I love.

Floor standers inherently don't cost a lot more - but to do them well does. The reason is resonances - to make a standmount or bookshelf non resonant (at least reasonably so anyway - to really attack it is very costly) is not too hard but a floor stander is a lot more costly. Then you have higher transport and delivery costs.

That said there are many excellent floorstanders at or below $5k. In fact I would suggest looking at some speakers a bit under that such as some of the Salk Audio models:
http://www.salksound.com/about%20us.htm

Martin Logan:
http://www.martinlogan.com/electromotion/em-esl.php

Magnepan:
http://www.magnepan.com/index

Go out and have a listen. You should be able to find dealers for Martin Logan and Magnepan and some posts on Salks forum at Audiocircles should dig up some people in your area with Salk speakers to listen to.

Its not a race - take your time and listen to gear to get just what you want.

Thanks
Bill

What do you like and dislike about the speakers that you now have? You mention wanting a bigger sound but that can mean different things. Are you talking about something image size, or something similar?

Zd542,
what got me on the speaker path is that I was all ready to spend 2k on a CD transport but then I came to the realization that it was more then I spent on my speakers, and if anything speakers would make the biggest difference to sound so now I am thinking I underspent on the very important speaker component of my system. I like the studio 20's very much but I am thinking that I can get even more sound by putting that 2k towards more expensive speakers. I will have these for 10 years min so I might as well get something good now.

The subwoofer arrangement is enticing, but that means another box to put somewhere and I just do not have the floor space to hide it.