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I'm currently saving up for a Pioneer Elite VSX-74TXVi 140 x 7 to upgrade from an Onkyo TX-SR503 75 x 7. It's just 8ohm and that's it. I was wondering which floor-speaker sounds better the M60 or M80. And if the M80 are indeed the better speaker could you point me in the direction of a good 2-channel amp to power them where my receiver isn't 4ohm capable?

How big is your room? The m60's and m80's are very similar. For larger rooms the m80's will play to more insane volumes, but most will find the m60's to be adequate. How do you plan to use the speakers also would help? My m60's fill my 900 sq ft room just fine, although m80's would be nice.

It's just gonna be a medium sized room not even 2500 sq ft at the most. But the one thing I liked about the 80's over the 60's is they have 2 mids and 2 tweeters instead of 1 mid and 1 tweeter. But then again the biggest my room is gonna be at the most would be 2500 sq ft and it wont get nearly the size of that. So I'm wondering even though I like having 2 mids and tweets, would it be too much for the size of my room?

2500 sq ft is a freaking huge room, bigger than my whole basement, which is 2200 sq ft.

Quote:

2500 sq ft is a freaking huge room, bigger than my whole basement, which is 2200 sq ft.

Ok I'm sorry I guess I kinda exaggerated a little bit LOL Um honestly right now my living room is an apartment 16L x 12W x 8H which that's what like 1500 sq feet. When me and my gf get out of our apartment the living room we'll be in will be hopefully more along the lines of like 16L+ x 16W+ x 10H or at least that big. I'm really gonna look for something more along the lines of like 20L x 20W x 10H which would be 4000 sq ft. But I would like to have something bigger than what I have right now. So you still think the 60's are still gonna be sufficient for what I'm wanting to have?

I was being funny, Sq Ft is Length X Width, Cubic Feet is Length X Width X Height.

So your living room is 16ft x 12ft = 192 Sq Ft
If you throw in the height into the equation 192 x 8 = 1536 Cubic Ft.

In your other example 20ft x 20ft = 400 Sq Ft.
Adding the height gives you 400 x 10 = 4,000 cubic feet

Hey Polk....first and foremost welcome aboard, secondly I believe you may be confusing square feet with cubic feet. A 20' x 20' room would be 400 sq. ft (room height doesnt come into play) , a 20' x 20' x 10'(h) would be a 4000 cubic ft. room. A 4000 sq. ft room would be the size of a larger house!

EDIT - What he said...

Dang Randy...you beat me to the punch!

...and what is IN the punch, exactly?

Polkie, the 74TXV isn't "just 8 ohm" regardless of the specs in the manual. It's got very powerful amplification at 4 ohms which should almost certainly be plenty for a speaker such as the M80 in your size room.

Good morning!

I have the '74TXVi with the M60's and it sounds very very good. As you can see from my sig, I have the 60's with M3's in the back, VP100, QS4's and an EP350. All sound excellent.

But if I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure I would go with the Pioneer. I have run into a couple of odd quirks and have gotten absolutely NO help from Pioneer in resolving them:

* Selecting HDMI as an input source means Audio HAS to come in that way too. That means you can't switch video with this receiver on a device with DVI output and use a different audio source (like Coax or Optical).

* There is something going on with the receiver when you select an HDMI source and then select something else. My DirecTV H20 receiver goes bananas when the Pioneer selects it. DirecTV doesn't know why and Pioneer won't respond.

* The little doors on the optical inputs are very fragile - I've already broken one, and once broken it won't grip the optical connector very well.

Having said all that, I am not about to change at this point. I've been able to work around all these little oddities, and it does sound great and runs very cool. I'd probably lose my shirt selling the receiver and it does sound great.

The Outlaw (www.outlawaudio.com) gear looks very good with an excellent customer-service reputation, but I'm sure it has its quirks too. As usual, YMMV.

-Brian n8wrl

Polk,
I think you may wish to try the Onkyo TX-SR503 with either the M60 or M80 first, before you bother to look at switching out to a more powerful amp/receiver. There are a number of forum members here that successfully use Onkyo receivers to power both the M60 and M80 model speakers. Quite a few receiver manufacturers state 8ohm only as sort of a "cover your a**" policy. Despite that many well designed receivers will easily handle the very benign 4ohm M80 load.

Is there a problem with audio coming from DVI or HDMI. isn't that the purpose of these cables. I have a Pioneer VSX-72 and just got a HD TV and a HD cable box that has DVI. I was planning on getting one of those DVI to HDMI cables. Is that a bad idea?

The problem I ran into was a DVD player with DVI output. The pioneer only has HDMI for digital. HDMI is backward compatable with DVI but includes audio too. DVI does not. Sooo, a DVI-to-HDMI cable works and transmits the video, but there will be no audio on the HDMI.

What I ended up doing was going DVI->HDMI to my Plasma, and optical to the Pioneer for audio.

-Brian n8wrl

-Brian