I'm trying to decide if I'll see a noticeable benefit by upgrading my speakers.

I do about 70%HT and 30%Music. The reason I have started to look into upgrading is twofold. First, the highs and soundstage on my current speakers don't seem "enveloping" enough during movies. Second, the Polk soundstage (on my speakers anyway) seems to be very pointed in that if I move around any, the soundstage falls apart easily.

I have gone through lots of tweaking and moving around in my HT room which is about 25' x 14' with an 11' x 20' kitchen hanging off of one corner (so it's a large area). I have a 1' high soffett running on the ceiling from the back wall behind my couch to the front wall where the speakers are (kind of dividng the listening area).

I was in Best Buy helping a friend look for a *budget* set of speakers and was actually quite impressed with the Athena AS-F2's in terms of soundstage. Even in the terrible BB atmosphere, the soundstage stayed the same as I moved 10 feet to the R or L. It got me thinking that I could do better than my Polks.

I've done a bit of listening at both basic retail shops and a couple of high end at many models and I'm actually considering either an Axiom M80ti setup or possibly Ascend 340 l/r (both with surrounds and center channel obviously).

My question is whether or not I'll hear a benefit from upgrading the Polk RT2000p's to either Axiom or Ascend or if i'd have to jump way up in price to get an improvement. I can certainly "demo" the ascends and axioms, but before I even get to that, do you all think I'm going to hear a big difference? Will my sherbourn be able to power the Axiom M80's to a sound level close to what I can get from the Polk RT2000p's? Am I losing something by moving away from the polk powered towers? I'd certainly like to utilize my Sherbourn more and be able to unplug the Polks if I can get similar performance.

I read a review of some of the newer Polk stuff on the Polk forum and someone said they hadn't had speakers that gave them the home theater experience quite like their RT2000p's

So what do you think? Is it worth even going through the demo process for the axioms or ascends or will I not hear that much of a difference?

My setup
B&K Ref 31
Sherbourn 5/1500A
Polk RT2000p Front
Polk CS400i Center
Infinity Overture 1's surround
SVS 20-39 PC (upgraded to PCi driver)
SVS 20-39 PCi