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I've thought about going the totally powered monitors route, resulting in a lot less boxes, but i thought monitors were a lot less enjoyable to listen too? I certainly dont enjoy listening to music on my yamaha monitors, since they're far too critical.

Don't follow your logic. If the quality is there why wouldn't they be good to listen to ?....
How are they too critical, showing up weakness in the front end electronics ?
 
Everything just sounds thin and linear, no flow to music and everything just sounds lifeless. Which is the point i guess.

Just looked those Yam's up, so they are a self powered speaker, so that's amps and speakers for 240 quid !!! and they have metal drive units ?? :eek:
What are you expecting from them ????

Do they sound better when you sit further back ?
Perhaps you need to look at the front end, and the connect to the DAC, how good is the source files and playback ?
 
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Foobar/Asio4all>FLAC>Benchmark dac1>yamahas/primare i21>mission 751f.

No to be honest, they dont seen any better further back, just pretty thin. I think you are right and its the powered route i need to go, I just wasnt sure if it would take out all the life from the speakers.

Not sure why you are so focused on powered or unpower speakers.... basically there are good speakers and bad ones, and good amps and bad amps......
Putting all in one box ties you what they do. I'd look for some conventional speakers you like the sound of, and a suitable amp to drive them.
Then perhaps tidy up the position, as I said before may be some wall brackets, and sit back when listening.

If you want active speakers with the amps built in, perhaps something from Dynaudio, Adam or ATC ?

Though I would go the Linn route with the active cards mounted in the amp.
Pair of used Linn Katan and active cards installed in say a 5125 would be excellent.
 
Monitors aren't boring, it's just because they aren't EQ'ed and made to hide the quality of a recording they are seen that way. The aim with any good speaker is to provide an accurate output of what the original recording sounds like (which is why they use monitors in production so they can critically analyse stuff), which is why trend towards a neutral frequency response. This just means that the bass in a dance song and the bass in country song should be faithful to the recording, where as on cheap speakers that are bass-boosted to sound more 'enjoyable' everything will have a mid-bass hump regardless of whether it was in the original recording or not. Monitors are also designed for nearfield listening, since they sit on/around the mixing desk, where as speakers are generally designed to have some distance between them and the listener.

Obviously different brands will have a slightly different flavour because of parts used, soundstage, sweet spot, frequency roll off at the treble and bass end, fluffy language used to describe how they deliver the sound and so on, but they will all generally share the trait of being neutral enough that people making music will hear what they've actually recorded, rather than a speaker designed to make things like YouTube audio sound less crap than it actually is a lot of the time.

There is a balancing act to be had between how revealing/forgiving you want them to be - because if you listen to a lot of modern music that is recorded/produced/mastered poorly you WILL hear it on good speakers or monitors - but conversely things that are well recorded will sound fantastic, and you may well hear details that you had never picked up before (at least on speakers, since headphones are generally better for microdetail and intimacy with a recording).

I'm looking at the Focal CMS series, but the newer Adam AX series also get good reviews too. The only thing with monitors is some can be fatiguing because of their excellent treble response, such as the Adam A series the AX replaced, but this can all be found out via reviews and looking online.
 
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Small room ='s monitors - pretty much what they're made for, right?

Alternatively, and this would be my preference, get a fantastic DAC, headphone amp and headphone solution.
 
You will get better headphones for the same money than monitors for sure. They have advantages and disadvantages just as speakers do though.

I would probably get a DAC with a decent headphone amp built into it as well, get the monitors then if want the do the headphone thing you can get them, then upgrade to a better headphone amp and you'll have a great dual set up.
 
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