I am considering on-wall speaker options for a farm house living room, 4x8x3,5 meters dimension. There is no loft, you can see the wooden structure of the roof, so the volume of the room is larger than usual. Would 4 speakers connected to a Yamaha R- S700 cover it? I usually listen to jazz music. Thanks in advance Philip

Philip, welcome to Axiom. Although the total volume of a listening room is of some significance, by far the most important factor is the distance of the listening position from the speakers. A room doesn't have to be "filled" with sound at the level which is satisfactory where your ears are.

Since the R-S700 is a stereo receiver, it's unclear how you would be using four speakers, but it can be said that the 100 watt rating it carries should be fine to drive speakers of average sensitivity(such as the Axioms)to plenty of listening volume at typical listening position distances on the order of 3-4 meters.

We're supposed to be metric here in Canada but I still think in feet so... 13 x 26 x 10 feet. Seems to me that 4 on-wall speakers (M3s or M22s, I would probably lean to M3s) should be fine for mostly-jazz listening (I'm interpreting that as *not* wall-of-sound rock).

Guessing you'll be running the 4 speakers as A and B pairs with A+B selected ? I'm not sure whether to be concerned about your receiver driving 2 paralleled pairs of speakers -- the reviews I saw for the R-S700 suggested it had two separate power amps (presumably to support zone-2) and so A and B were driven separately. If that's true then no problem for sure.

Hah... I came back to add "... and welcome to the forum" but JohnK beat me to it :)j

EDIT -- looks like you need a separate amplifier for zone-2, so the article that talked about the receiver having two distinct amplifiers for A and B outputs seems to be wrong. Here is the article, maybe I misread something:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/receivers...ge-3-setup.html

Doesn't mean you will have problems driving two sets of speakers in parallel, just that it has to be considered. Looking at M3s and M22s the impedence curves seem well behaved so I wouldn't expect any problems.

Thank you both for the replies. Yes, listening distance will usually be around 3 meters, so the M3s will be an affordable solution. Do they also handle vocals well?

Ah, and what about combining M3s and M22s in the same room?

My view is that the M22s handle vocals a bit better than even the M3s, because they have a more linear response in the mid/upper bass region which is important in voice reproduction.

You still haven't commented about how you'd plan to make use of four speakers. Whatever the use may be, it would seem to be better to have the four identical.