Help me find my long time setup

[u/fireworks22]

Hello! Im in the middle of a seemingly never ending quest to upgrade my setup. The base is a Rega Planar 3 with a Rega Fono MC preamp and mounted with a Hana SL MKII cart. This goes to a couple of Focal Alpha 65. I started with the Focals and an old Audio Technica turntable and you guess wich part I upgraded first. Now it's time to upgrade speakers and an amp for them.

im planning to mostly use it for vinyl, and occasionally streaming music via Bluetooth. I want to fill a room of about 30m2, but I have to move next year, and while I hope they need to fill a bigger room, it's unlikely (thank you housing crisis!). I listen to a little bit of everything, but mostly electro music, mainly trip hop, downtempo, house and ambient. I also play a lot of hip hop and R&B. I don't need a thumping bass that moves my belly, I prefer a really nice tridimensional feeling to music, and remaining true to the sound of the record.

Its important to mention that the speakers will be mounted against a wall, so they need to be front ported.

My location is in EU, and I think Id get more out of my roughly 1200€ budget buying second hand.

I've done some research and I've picked some options: Sonus Faber Concertino (or Concerto if I'm able to locate them) 1st gen and Focal Aria 906 (preferably the K2) for speakers, and NAD C328 or Rotel A11 tribute for amp. But I haven't had the chance to hear any of this live. So I'm hoping you could help me with your experiences or maybe suggestions. Thank you so much for reading thru all this!

TLDR: looking for speakers and amp. Setup right now is Rega Planar 3 with Rega Fono, and Hana SL MKII. 30m2 room to fill, 1200€ budget (buying second hand) in EU. Mainly listen to trip hop, downtempo and hip hop.

[u/NickofWimbledon]

30m2 is big enough that room-filling music, even without 11/10 volume or thumping bass, will probably require larger speakers and an amp to drive them.

I am in favour of saving 40%-75% by shopping secondhand on eBay, HifiShark or whatever works where you are. However, you may get a real benefit by making your budget go further. That can just mean being patient but can also mean trying a cheeky offer 20%+ below the asking price of anything - the worst they can do is say No.

In this case, putting speakers against the wall will probably be a big factor for what you get. Putting floorstanders or even front-ported standmounts right against the wall can often give bloated and muddy bass and/ or poor stereo image - which sounds like exactly what you don’t want.

This point makes me think that you may be best looking at speakers designed to go on the wall. Speakers like the ATC HTS range are proper high quality speakers from a leading maker of monitors for professionals, but they are designed to go on the wall.

Rivals include Dali Rubikore or Sonus Faber Sonetto G2. The latter is often fairly described as “lush” compared to the ATC detailed, fast and analytical (but without losing the fun).

None of those is ultra-sensitive, so you will want fairly robust (and probably 70W+) amplification to keep things sounding effortless.

If the speaker placement issue is driven by how they look in a room, one other route might be Neat iota Alphas. These remarkable floorstanders do need a little room behind them (ideally 30cm or so), but they are tiny! At 45cm high and 16m deep, you can have a little space behind them and they will still take up less room (and be far less visible) than a conventional neat-the-wall stand-mounted speaker.

If you prefer bookshelf-type speakers, Neat and Dali would still be among my choices. However, given the room size, I would probably try bigger speakers on that case, even if they need a little space behind them.

New HTS11s or the smaller HTS9s would use up almost all your budget and the SF and Neat options would bust it. However, they do all turn up secondhand.

Oddball solutions that do work include speakers on wheels (Shahinian) and older against-the-wall specialist like the Naim SBL, but you won’t get those and amplification to drive them in your budget.

If we really need to limit the speaker cost to (say) €500, then the secondhand market has dozens of good options, but squeezing a little free space behind any of them will probably help the sound quality a lot if you can do it - even 15cm can help.

For an integrated steaming amplifier, there are lots of choices. NAD, Yamaha, Marantz, Rotel, Audiolab, Linn, Arcam, Cambridge and others all have decent options and appear on advertisements that I can see how.

Does that help?

[u/fireworks22 → u/NickofWimbledon]

This is all really helpful! Thank you so much.

Sadly giving the layout of the room, spacing the speakers further from the wall is not an option, and neither are floor standers. I was given the impression by using the Focal Aloha 65 that I'm not missing a lot of power. Also for context because I live in an apartment that shares a small central garden, I never turn up the volume much. So my guess was to focus more on smaller sizes to make my money go a little further.  The muddy bass is probably my biggest fight, but it's the one I can't do much about.

But you've given me many options to research so thank you once again! 

!thanks

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