Hmm... OK, so I moved the M60s from HT area down to the living room and worked over the living room acoustics to make a decent listening area for music. M40s moved from the music system back up to the HT area. I just paralleled M2s on top to make M42s, which sound pretty good even for music. That just led to a serious D'oh!! moment though...
My original reason for setting up a separate music system (some years back) was that my AV receiver didn't have a phono input and I didn't know about standalone phono preamps at the time.
Now that I know about phono preamps, and since I'm planning to move the office up to the loft (HT area), I guess a better plan might have been to fix up the acoustics in the HT area, pick up a phono preamp and run everything through the AVR instead.
Of course the HT area has its own acoustic challenges -- it's basically an attic arrangement where the ceiling angles at 45 degrees all the way to the floor, so there's a huge honkin' mode because the distance from floor to ceiling to opposite ceiling to floor is constant no matter where you start, and it has all the usual "speakers on the short wall" challenges too.
Not looking forward to starting the acoustics exercise again but it would be nice to have a useable-for-something-other-than-audio living room again too.
Improving the HT acoustics would also improve sound for movies, and having a 200WPC amp driving the mains couldn't hurt for those "crank it to 11, the helicopter's about to hit the building" moments. I also plan to get off my butt one day and flash the AVR firmware to properly support 7.1 and then use the M2s as rear surrounds, so I guess it all fits. Pity.
(this was a quick pic to show the new VP180, it's tidier now)
