[fsimms]

Look at transmission line speakers.  They work very well in a small room.  The bass doesn't seem to interact with the room's boundries like other speakers do.  Jim Salk makes a very good transmission line speaker.  It also can be close to a rear wall.

http://www.salksound.com/SongTower.shtml

If you can stand a bit larger speaker that costs a bit more then you can get Jim's  Veracity QWT.   It is also transmission line and it is a good step higher in the food chain.

[launche]

An often overlooked but very good option is the NHT XD speaker system.
For $3600 new you can get this dual sub fullrange (20hz-20kz) option with amps included, speaker and sub cables too. Each driver has a dedicated amp.  The system is designed to work well together,  DSP crossover and equalization, controlled dispersion, bipole subs equalized and phase corrected.  At the price I can't think of too many options that offer a better value, plug and playability with high WAF factor if that's needed.  Plays well in a small and/or untreated room.  Color me impressed when I tempoparily took down most of my 16 room treatments and the sound did not fall to pieces.  IMO, one of the absolute better buys in audio at the moment for a small to mid-sized speaker system.

Whichever way you go, if any way at all, I do vote for a controlled disperson design in a room with limited placement, treatment and seating options.

[Zero]

Most loudspeakers from Totem Acoustic work well in smaller sized rooms. 

[THE_ANSWERS]

Look at transmission line speakers.  They work very well in a small room.  The bass doesn't seem to interact with the room's boundries like other speakers do.  Jim Salk makes a very good transmission line speaker.  It also can be close to a rear wall.

http://www.salksound.com/SongTower.shtml

If you can stand a bit larger speaker that costs a bit more then you can get Jim's  Veracity QWT.   It is also transmission line and it is a good step higher in the food chain.

interesting comment about TL speakers     they might be a bit heavy but it thats not a problem id agree

check out planar speakers     many have excellent sound and they are easy to carry and set up    some even mount to the wall on hinges but the floor standing ones are best like magnepan    i had a pair of the maggies once from a trade     they were so clean but not a huge amount of bass in a large room so i tried them in a small room ( bedroom) and wham !!!!!!!     they didn't need to be so far from the wall to sound just right and unlike esl they dont need to be plugged into the grid     be careful though cause you can easily bottom them out so dont use a super big amp

maybe use separate subs in addition to get that last octave way down low !!!!   good luck with your project there

[pbrstreetgang]

An often overlooked but very good option is the NHT XD speaker system.
For $3600 new you can get this dual sub fullrange (20hz-20kz) option with amps included, speaker and sub cables too. Each driver has a dedicated amp.  The system is designed to work well together,  DSP crossover and equalization, controlled dispersion, bipole subs equalized and phase corrected.  At the price I can't think of too many options that offer a better value, plug and playability with high WAF factor if that's needed.  Plays well in a small and/or untreated room.  Color me impressed when I tempoparily took down most of my 16 room treatments and the sound did not fall to pieces.  IMO, one of the absolute better buys in audio at the moment for a small to mid-sized speaker system.

Whichever way you go, if any way at all, I do vote for a controlled disperson design in a room with limited placement, treatment and seating options.

NHT is blowing them out for 2900 complete right now! I always wanted to try a pair but the all inclusive system is a benefit and a curse

[jaywills]

I'll second the gallo Ref. 3.1 recommendation (no affiliation other than owning a pair).  The folks at 6 moons seemed to like them a lot and one reviewer called them "state of the art" for smaller rooms, IIRC.  Good luck in your search.  Cordially,

[launche]

An often overlooked but very good option is the NHT XD speaker system.
For $3600 new you can get this dual sub fullrange (20hz-20kz) option with amps included, speaker and sub cables too. Each driver has a dedicated amp.  The system is designed to work well together,  DSP crossover and equalization, controlled dispersion, bipole subs equalized and phase corrected.  At the price I can't think of too many options that offer a better value, plug and playability with high WAF factor if that's needed.  Plays well in a small and/or untreated room.  Color me impressed when I tempoparily took down most of my 16 room treatments and the sound did not fall to pieces.  IMO, one of the absolute better buys in audio at the moment for a small to mid-sized speaker system.

Whichever way you go, if any way at all, I do vote for a controlled disperson design in a room with limited placement, treatment and seating options.

NHT is blowing them out for 2900 complete right now! I always wanted to try a pair but the all inclusive system is a benefit and a curse

All the better, but I think the $2900 is with just for one sub.  Yes, a blessing and a curse depends on your viewpoint. It just seems straight forward enough to me but I know many like to do their own work.  But hell, the money and time alone I've wasted trying to find friendly speaker/amp combo's...  For many who don't have a major preference for this or that and doesn't want to go through all the trial and error, it works.

This is maybe the smallest system I've had and I thought I was making big compromises, turns out I feel ahead of the game.  Looks nice, sounds nice, plays far better in a typical room them many other speakers I've owned, the wife's happy, the kids can't easily rip it to shreds, my electric bill has gone down, I never wonder if this amp or that amp will sound better, I've even got comfy with the stock speaker cables and resisted the urge to spend big money for improvement.  I did try something different once and felt no reason to chase my tail on that front.  With the system a bit more optimized than most, speaker cable and interconnect differences become less of an issue IMO.  All I really have had to do is feed the system some good power and I've been rewarded. The system is very competent, being human it will more likely boil down to preferences.  

I'm a tube guy at heart but not when my electric bill is high from running them, not when I'm worried about tube failure, not when I have to spend $1200 to replace them etc...  I'm a big speaker guy, well not when I don't have a room to do them justice, well not when they are too imposing in my living space, not when I need help to move them to experiment with speaker placement, not when...  well you get the point.  The NHT XD and many others are what I call real world, common sense speaker options.  Sorry to side track the thread.

[doug s.]

An often overlooked but very good option is the NHT XD speaker system.
For $3600 new you can get this dual sub fullrange (20hz-20kz) option with amps included, speaker and sub cables too. Each driver has a dedicated amp.  The system is designed to work well together,  DSP crossover and equalization, controlled dispersion, bipole subs equalized and phase corrected.  At the price I can't think of too many options that offer a better value, plug and playability with high WAF factor if that's needed.  Plays well in a small and/or untreated room.  Color me impressed when I tempoparily took down most of my 16 room treatments and the sound did not fall to pieces.  IMO, one of the absolute better buys in audio at the moment for a small to mid-sized speaker system.

Whichever way you go, if any way at all, I do vote for a controlled disperson design in a room with limited placement, treatment and seating options.

NHT is blowing them out for 2900 complete right now! I always wanted to try a pair but the all inclusive system is a benefit and a curse

All the better, but I think the $2900 is with just for one sub....

the blow-out website offers the subs "a-la-carte" for $600.  maybe they would cut you a break if you bought it w/the $2900 system...  or, go nuts & buy three of them, for a 4-sub system!   

i use a deqx in my system, & i think it's excellent - i imagine it will work nicely w/the nht speakers...

doug s.

[launche]

I'll second the gallo Ref. 3.1 recommendation (no affiliation other than owning a pair).  The folks at 6 moons seemed to like them a lot and one reviewer called them "state of the art" for smaller rooms, IIRC.  Good luck in your search.  Cordially,

The Gallo's are a nice speaker but with that wide dispersion patterned tweeter, one's small room might best be treated well enough or layed out nicely or one may not realise the benefits and in many cases get too much uncontrolled treble energy at the ear making for a less than coherent sound and maybe making the speaker sound tipped up.  Next to a good ribbon tweeter, the gallo tweeter in one of my favs.  But the Gallo is another very good option, especially if you need something more full range and on the smaller side.  I really like the look of that speaker, one reason I moved on from mine was that the kids would have destroyed it.

[JeffB]

I can't find any info about the xD on NHT's website.
It seems funny to completely eliminate the line.
It doesn't look like they have a replacement.
Didn't the xD system originally run around $8000.

[fiveoclockfriday]

There is a mention on the NHT site under "Vintage" - http://nhthifi.com/current/products/vintage/xds.html.

They link to a company that's selling a complete XD system for $2999.
http://www.listenup.com/content/partner_stores/nht/home.php
That sounds like a steal! If I were in the market a little more, I might have to snag it. Great reviews from the mags and a cool design to boot.

-Eric

[Duke]

I'll offer up a couple of comments on why two of the recommendations made here are likely to work well in small rooms.

First, the SP Tech speakers.  Due to their excellent pattern control of the tweeter's output, they are likely to sound smooth throughout the vocal region even in a small, fairly reverberant room.  The reason is, they avoid the typical radiation pattern "flare" at the bottom end of the tweeter's range, which if not properly compensated for can result in excess reverberant field energy in the 3-4 kHz region - right smack where the ear is most sensitive.   Also, their pattern can be aimed if desired to reduce the early side-wall reflection.  That being said, it is possible to design a conventional format speaker that has a smooth power response, and my ears tell me that Mike Dzurko of ACI has done exactly that. 

Next, transmission lines.  In my opinion one of the practical in-room advantages of the transmission line is that, when the woofer and line terminus are fairly far apart, these two bass sources will be displaced relative to one another in three dimensions and will each interact with the room somewhat differently.  These two differering room-interaction peak-and-dip patterns will average out smoother than either one alone, with the net result that a pair of transmission lines will often (but not always) be smoother in a small room than a pair of conventional speakers.   

I'm not sure that a transmission line speaker normally has a first order bass rolloff.  This may be true of some transmission lines, but I think that typically they have a third order rolloff below system resonance, in between sealed and vented boxes in this respect.  Note that the output from the woofer and line terminus are out-of-phase below the 1/4 wavelength resonance, which imposes a second-order rolloff all by itself even if the woofer's output remained flat.

Duke

[JackD201]

In my experience, especially with small rooms, it is the room itself that is the limiting factor and not the loudspeaker. We've advised clients to get smaller, less expensive loudspeakers from us and advised them to use the savings on room treatments and/or DSP correction under the guidance of any out of a long list of acousticians here (almost all are AES fellows).

Here in the Philippines the building codes dictate that most houses have concrete or hollow block and plaster walls owing to the fact that we are situated in the Pacific Ring of Fire. "Raw" rooms have long and jagged reverberation issues over here and this still doesn't take into account speaker issues such as radiation patterns.

Given this context, my most common recommendation is to build pressure traps for wide Q anomalies and/or Helmholtz resonators for narrower Q anomalies tuned and centered to the most offending frequencies . I recommend pressure traps because they don't eat up as much of the precious space as velocity traps do. They're pretty much just false walls. There are times when rooms are just impossible to tame as was the case in one small square/cube of a room we encountered. There was no recourse except to shrink the room further by building closets along one side with heavy closet doors to give the room a more workable geometry.

I wish I could give a blanket statement or offer a silver bullet but as is the case with any problem there are many permutations to their solutions.

Should the client be unwilling to make such large commitments I fall back on the saying "No bass is better than bad bass" and advise that they go for limited frequency transducers and add a subwoofer that possesses enough tuning options or even adding a parametric equalizer for the subs. Calibration can be done with some patience and elbow grease with a test CD, a Radioshack SPL meter and a spreadsheet. Not counting the sub this could cost as little as $300.

[opaqueice]

I have considered adding a sub-woofer but find that implementation not practical for my set-up.  Of course cost is not no object, preferably in the US$5 to 6k range.

My room dimensions are 15.6 x 10.5 x 8.0 & currently using Focus Audio FS-788s speakers.

I'd recommend trying digital room correction.  In my experience that can help tremendously with bass problems. 

There are various ways to implement it - if you can use a computer as a source, or if you have a squeezebox/transporter, you can try it for only the cost of a microphone and computer/mic interface (~$200) and see if you think it will work.  A more expensive option that will work with any source is the TacT processor, and there are others out there as well.

[mca]

Does the NHT Xd system do automatic room correction? I can't find any info on the website on how this is done.

[launche]

Does the NHT Xd system do automatic room correction? I can't find any info on the website on how this is done.

Sadly, it does not. It was something they optioned for but it never came to be.  It seems overall this approach doesn't seem to be a major priority for speaker designers.  To my knowledge even the more expensive designs similiar to the XD system like Salagar and others don't offer room correction either.