I bought a pair of Monitor Audio Bronze 2’s a few years ago for my home office - but I’d like to improve my audio sound quality - the room is 15’x15’ and I listen to rock/jazz. I can afford to add to my system, but is my money better spent by adding a subwoofer, or selling the Bronze 2’s and buying Floorstanding towers? Which would give me better audio sound?
It would really depend what you want to do, you could go with bookshelves and a sub or go for tower speakers, both would give satisfactory results. What amp and dac are you using?
You also mention that this is for a home office. Are you doing nearfield (basically, spekaers on a desktop and you listen while sitting at the desk) listening or more classic “in-the-room” listening?
Regardless of the setup there are some considerations you should think about. Full-range floorstanding speakers have a reputation within the audiofile community for creating a more seemless blend between the bass frequencies and the rest of the frequency spectrum. That thinking stems from the fact that there’s one signal input - and provided there is a high quality crossover network - therefore are no (or at least fewer) phasing issues that could arise from filtering out low frequencies and sending them to another reproduction subsystem. The downside of having all of the frequency spectrum come from the same speaker is you lose flexbility in room placement. In reality, the best speaker position for things like soundstage and imaging are not likely to be the best positions for bass reproduction and vice versa. Having the bass reproduced by specialized equipment allows you to place your speakers for optimum spatial reproduction and the subs for optimum bass reproduction. That takes more work and then you do need to figure out how to blend the lows and the highs together. I should also note that having floorstanding speakers in no way precludes you from ALSO using subwoofer(s). Also, if you’re willing and able to spend the money on room correction and use it a lot of those blending issues will be taken care of for you.
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