To be honest with you i was very surprised with how good they was. I went to richer sounds to buy a pair of Tannoy Mercury F3'S but they was out of stock so i had a demo of the Wharfedales and they blew me away. They are very good in the budget set up i have got at the moment. It would be interesting to see how they would do on a valve amp or a more higher end intergrated amp. I've even ran them off of a Sony Giga Juke system i used to have and they still sounded good, they were even better than the F1 Customs again, although the bass was abit lighter on the Giga Juke than the Sony amp i run them on now. I've owned many Tannoy Speakers in the past (Tannoy M3, Tannoy Profile 636 and F1 Customs) and the whrfedale CR 30.4 has sounded good or even better in same cases than all of these. I'm only really upgrading because i want abit more of a higher end set up now and something with abit more bass, i know i could add a subwoofer and i have ran stand mount and sub woofer systems in the past but i don't really want the arterficial sound the you can get with a sub in the system, i want something with a nice controlled deep bass and one that doesn't take over the music, i still want to hear all of the vocals and instruments like i can with my Wharfedales but just with better quality.