Hmmmmmm.....Bookshelf vs floorstanders?
When we started in home theater in the old house, we started with bookshelf speakers for the front channels cuz we had a small room. We started cheap and used a moderately inexpensive 5.1 channel HTIB(home theater in a box)but fairly quickly(Hah! Quick my..uh, never mind)spent a lot of time deciding on a good set of bookshelfs, ended up with M3s!(Good stuff) Anyway; M3s for mains and HTIB speakers for the rest. All small speakers for a small room. and a small 10" sub.
Then for a birthday or Christmas or something, our youngest Daughter gave us her four kids to raise, and we suddenly needed a bigger house!! And bigger speakers cuz the M3s seemed just a bit strained in our much larger listening room when we tried to invite even moderate sized orchestras into our home.
....we may have been straining our 55WPC amp as well.
So...
We got floorstanders to take up the slack. And the more numerous drivers in bigger boxes just SING when asked to do so!!
We pushed the M3s to the back for surrounds and added another M3 up front for center duties, got a more powerfull receiver and of course added a bigger sub!
The M3 bookshelf speakers work great and never seem strained in center and surround duties, although they sure didn't seem happy as mains. As mains they had to work too hard since I insisted on crossing them at 60hz and the sub integration didn't seem to work as well as I liked. The M3s just couldn't keep up with the sub at the volume levels I was asking for.
......(speakers? Amp? Both? I dunno....)But;
My M50s keep up with no problem at all and even ask for more!!
