Whats better. A smaller speaker pushed or a higher end speaker with low volume?

[steve_1979]

i actually tried the combination at the store.

I put a good quality sub together with the booksheves and it worked but it still loses the mids that the floorstander has.

I dont know what imaging means but the bookshelves have a certain punchy projection thats cool. they dont really add any ambiance and it sounds more direct and focused.

I wonder if combining both would be awesome . lol bookshelf and floorstanders.

in general i liked the floorstander more without any subwoofer. i dont really like subs at all.

the subwoofer sounds best to my ears with the bookshelves though.

Like I said - a good 2.1 system is difficult to get right and most of them don't work particularly well with music. But if you can find the right combination of speakers and subwoofer the results can be fantastic.

I think the problem is that most speakers have too much bass distortion to enable them to integrate properly with a subwoofer. Also good quality subwoofers don't come cheap and many subwoofers which are primarily designed for use with movies in a 5.1 setup sound fine with the deep booms and explosions in films but they don't really cut it when it comes to accurate music reproduction.