I'm looking to put together a new 5.4 system really soon and one setup I'm strongly considering is Ascend. However, one concern I have is with the small-ish woofers on the Sierra Tower. One genre of music I listen to is orchestral music, which often has very high dynamic ranges. On my old system the loudest I ever measured it was 110db max with 117db peak. That was extremely brief on a 7.1 recording of a modern symphony with a lot of low-bass output, so it's an extreme/rare example, but I would expect to regularly hit climaxes that would push over/around 100-105db and I worry how well a couple of 5.25" woofers would handle that (especially distortion-wise).

An alternate possibility I'm considering is getting 5 2EX monitors and supplementing each with a Rythmik FM8 from ~50Hz-250Hz, essentially using them as mid-bass woofers, then using some larger Rythmik's (perhaps F18s) for the deeper bass.

I'm really curious how these two options would compare, so here's my questions:

1. How does the mid-range driver/tweeter of the Sierrra Towers compare to the mid-range driver/tweeter of the 2EX? Does one or the other measure/sound significantly better?

2. What's the difference in sensitivity/power handling between them? On paper, the towers would seem to be higher at 90db/300watts, but I assume that's affected by the woofers and would be different if we were just considering the mids/tweeter.

3. How big of a difference would there be between the Sierra Towers 5.25" woofers VS the FM8?

4. I was also curious about what frequencies the bass/mid crossover is on the Sierra Towers.

There's not a huge difference in price between each option: about $7500 for 5 Sierra RAAL Towers VS $9000 for the 2EX-FM8 setup, so for that difference I'd rather just go for whichever is better.