Greetings!
I have a room that I need to upgrade. Just tonight, while auditioning the re-release of the Daft Punk Discovery on Vinyl, I watched the foam surround slowly fizzle away into a pile of red dust. The speakers in question are Cerwin Vega AT-8's.
Now I can restore the woofers for about $30, but these speakers I bought new 20 years ago, and while I think they sound great, I'm thinking its time to upgrade. These speakers didn't get a lot of play, because that specific room isn't used all that much, but I want to change that.
Since I have decided to get back in the 2-channel music world, I have been restoring and bringing up to date all the rest of my equipment. Here are some thoughts:
I have about 400w per channel (not peak) to play around with. I'm looking for another matching amp, and afterwords I will have about 700w per channel, mono-block style. I don't have a huge amount of space. My critical lissening is done on headphones, so the new speaker doesn't have to be super amazing. I want two speakers. I really don't want to get into adding a sub. Height is not an issue, but width may be.
I haven't auditioned speakers in a long while, but here is what I have heard and liked:
Martin Logan's electrostatic: I like the sound, but I don't like the 40-degree phase area deal, and I think they sound a little too bright, they are also too expensive and too big for this room. Why buy em if you're not going to use them!
Mirage Nanosat?: I really like the sound of these, but that would mean I have to get a sub, and I really don't want to get into that.
Paradigm: Again, I like the sound, but they didn't do anything special for me.
On budgeting for these speakers, since they won't see huge amounts of play time, I think the max I'm looking to spend is $800? And if just maybe, something is super fantastic, I'd do $1000. Of course, sounding good is of most concern, but just because something costs $1000 doesn't mean it sounds any better than my $300 CV's.
So, spend the $30 and restore my AT-8's, or spend more? A side note is that I mostly lissen to headphones, but I am wanting to slowly build a 2-channel system. This is only played when company is over and wants to hear something. But I will start using it more as time goes on... I'm also happy keeping the AT-8's until they totally fall apart.
As always, your suggestions are most appreciated.
