Hi, all.
I've attached a very crude drawing of my setup below, with focus on the HT area. As you can see, the listening room itself is not large (the ceiling is acoustical tile, standard height) but it opens up into a very large area on one side.
The MLP is slightly under 8 ft from the front tower speakers.
Basement Floorplan RS.jpg
Here is my current equipment:
Emotiva T2+ towers
Emotiva C2+ center
Polk FXi A4 surrounds
2x Hsu VTF-3 MK5 subs
Denon x4500h AVR
Monolith 3X200 power amp
At present I am thrilled with this setup for HT. For music listening, I engage the T2+ towers and subs. The Emotivas are surprisingly impressive for music at their price point, but the fact that they are so good at this pricing is creating a desire to jump up a couple of tiers and land on something even better.
My budget is roughly $3K but I'm willing to stretch slightly.
I'm absolutely satisfied with the C2+ center and I'm not left wanting anything from it for HT use, however, I am concerned about getting a "good enough" timbre match with either new towers or bookshelves. If I were to go the bookshelf route and got a Horizon center, is the RAAL upgrade all that important? For music I'm absolutely on board, but for HT use would I be missing anything by maintaining the dome tweeter?
Ideally I would love Sierra towers paired with a Horizon center along with a RAAL upgrade, but that would blow my budget to bits. The 2EXs of course get rave reviews and are very budget friendly, but at times I crank up the volume both for music and HT, and I fear that when I approach reference volume levels, the single woofer of the bookshelves just wouldn't cut it. The laws of physics seem to suggest that the much larger driver surface area of the towers would make a significant difference here. Perhaps I'm incorrect in that assumption.
Note that everything would be crossed at 80Hz as I never don't use the subs.
All of that said, below are the options that I am considering. I think I'd prefer option 1 if the C2+ center would be a close enough timbre match. All opinions and recommendations are appreciated!
OPTION 1:
2x Sierra Towers w/ RAAL upgrade
Maintain C2+ center
Total cost: $3334
OPTION 2:
2x Sierra 2EXs
Horizon center w/ RAAL upgrade
Total cost: $3196
OPTION 3:
2x Sierra 2EXs
Horizon center w/ dome tweeter
Total cost: $2846