I am rocking JBL LSR 305 on my desk (about 2 feet distance, soon I will change my desktop and will be about 3 feet away) for a couple of years and while I really like them I think of upgrade for a while. One of the things I would like to get a bit more is bass, but an upgrade in general would be nice too. Together with bass I wish to maintain or improve the soundstage (as LSR 305 are good in that category). Bass is a problem, while I don’t have a treated room I have cabinets and a smaller rug (but rest is hard floor) I tend to see that 6-8ft away (and a bit to the left or right) picks up in bass more, but being at desk I feel like low bass ran away.
But this is the desk setup and that will, of course, present some challenges. Now, after some consideration I want to “upgrade” to something smaller, which ruled out e.g. Edifier S1000/2000 series or Mackie MR624 or other bigger speakers, instead I would rather consider a sub to get that low-end meat I would otherwise have to get from bigger woofers of speakers.
Yet, I am intrigued by Klipsch The Fives for two reasons - it has some DSP-corrected boost in low frequencies in general and seems to be also EQ’d in bass for lower volume levels as well, which is what I would be running at a lot of time.
They come for a price though, whereas my other consideration is Edifier S360DB 2.1 system, which is about half the cost of Fives, however from some Digital Stereophony’s videos it looks the staging is not as wide as LSR305 or Fives or Edifier’s A80 speakers.
But…apologies for bragging, I feel I could be satisfied with Fives even with bass (there is a comparison sound demo of them vs. 305Ps and I like the bass and equivalent staging), but what I wonder - should I expect the bass of Fives at desk distance not having enough space to gain all bass energy and that under the desk sub would be a better option (for the price of probably worse staging).
Is there anything else interesting in sub-$1000 range? I am not much interested in passive solution as I already have DAC/AMP on my desk and I don’t really want another box there. We can also exclude Swan right away, not available in EU (I live in EU, but e.g. we can get Edifier locally just fine), but ignore that fact, if you know some, I will try to find some EU distribution.