Speaker System for noob 3k-4k budget

This is good to hear. I have been thinking about speaker upgrades, but based on some of the posts I read about room treatments, I have been wondering if I would be throwing away money on better speakers in a non-treated room. My past working assumption is that if you make a good choice, then you will benefit from an upgrade even if you might not squeeze the absolute last bit of performance without treatments. But some things I have read made me think that I would be wasting money without treatments. While my space is not ideal, it is a living room with furniture and rugs in it. I would like to think that I can upgrade my speakers and still see improvement without adding bass traps and whatnot, which is never going to fly in my home.

 

In my experience a lot has changed with the source I feed my speakers. While I'm not (hopeful, that I can stay clear) using vinyl, even dac as a source matters massively with speakers.
I would take Yggdrasil in a complete dump of a room with my Genelecs in a heartbeat instead of a purposely built room and use some random cheesy S-D dac.
Years back when there were not a whole lot to chose among sources, I went nuts myself with room acoustics, because this was all I knew how to improve sound.
I should probably eat my hat for the claims I have spewed out in the past.

 

If you don't need a lot of bass but listen to a lot of acoustic, jazz, classical etc for me this is about as good as it gets:

* Magnepan speaker. You should be able to afford the 3.7 second hand but the 1.7 is good too. http://www.magnepan.com/
* Some kind of beefy second hand NAD Amp. Lots of watts.
* Basic thick copper cables.

(if the room is really small maybe go for the 1.7 anyway)

That's it. Set it up in a good room and enjoy.

 

The fact remains that in small, Boston apartments, you're often sitting on a couch pushed up against the rear wall or window, which is horrible for acoustics. Not only that, but the walls are often brick instead of drywall, so even more reflective.

 

Some time ago we measured 5 semi-popular studio monitors in an anechoic chamber and then in a pretty ho-hum bedroom studio type of room.

• KRK VXT6
• ADAM A7X
• ADAM A77X
• Genelec 8040
• Equator D5

In-chamber:



In a typical home studio:



So basically if you can get rid of the room-boom and early reflections, then there's not much need for padding your whole room.

 

@Hrodulf^^ . This is quite a bizarre broad bass hump in that bedroom, probably 1/12dB octave smoothed too?
I've measured my 8050-s in variety of rooms, but usually there are nulls and peaks side-by-side in bass, being on average only slightly south of neutral.

Below both channels in listening positions, nearfield, in my old apartment (1/48 dB octave). Notice the ragged response. It's because all walls but one were brick covered with hard parget. In this location I preferred HD800 to speakers most of the time. Now I'm in a wooden house made entirely of logs, no such raggedness. Easily prefer speakers to headphones now.
Sadly I sold off my recording equipment, can't measure my current room, in which I'm quite happy.

 

Regarding room treatment. In my experience most crucial is to dampen room corners. I used to put whole rockwool spools on top of each other to achieve this, very effective but also very ugly to look at. No significant other will tolerate this, sadly.

Speaker design is big part of this as well, Genelecs need little early reflections suppression, but quite a bit bass treatment, especially if one is forced to locate speakers at the back wall. Placement on 1/4 of room length positioning sort of mitigates bass problems, if that option is available.

 

1. Yup, we're measuring on a net floating almost in the middle of the chamber. No room gain should occur.
2. All switches left on flat, otherwise not much of a comparison between the two graphs. The purpose of the graphs was to show how many speakers interact with the room. I think you're right about the table reflections, but I'm not sure if the back knobs will be able to correct for a peak that wide.
3. You're right about the 800Hz dip and it won't be easy to compensate for that. As for hanging the monitors higher up and then pointing them down - I've seen some local studios and usually they either use some kind of stands or a special shelf at the back of the mixing desk. I used stands to stretch the triangle larger and thus got this -



The 150Hz peak is mostly due to back wall being close to the back wall proximity.

 

When I was working in the Nashville studios we always just had them on top of the SSL meters.

 

It's too gentle for that , but it helps.

 

Actually for advising OP, and not further derailing the thread I should have suggested DSP speakers first. These will probably never reach that last 5% of perfection due to compromises in size, amping and form factor, but It's easy and foolproof solution to almost any acoustic environment.

One of my good friends asked the same sort of question from me few months ago. I said: '' get DSP Genelecs '', because he didn't want to mess with stuff.
I listened to my friends 8330 some time ago with my own R-2R dac.

The brilliant part about these is that the inner dac is bypassed and source of user's choice can shine through with corrections added to acoustics. These sounded really good. What matters is that my friend is happy too.
I'm a Genelec fanboy, so is he and YMMV...

Will these out resolve HD800? Yes.

 

Resolution in terms of dynamics graduations, maybe not, depending on his amp.
Transients are less sharp as well, so the perceived slam and quickness will be a bit less, but that is not all there is to resolution.
Tone on the newer Genelecs is closer to HD800S for better or for worse than other speakers I have heard.

What you suggested might easily be better fit as I have not heard these myself nor I'm totally sure what OP is looking for.

The mid-range clarity is hard to beat on the HD800(S), I've only heard a pair of full-ranges do that, but at the cost of so many sins.