Floors v. Bookshelf w/ the 1050

I may just be having a brain fart here and missing the obvious, but what the heck.....Assuming that you use your system primarily for HT and minimally for music, what would be the advantage of having floor standing speakers instead of bookshelves and a sub? If the crossover is engaged below where your mains drop off, and you have a sub that adequately handles frequencies below the crossover (such as an SVS PCi 20-39 , aren't you just wasting money buying more speaker than you actually need/use? With my 1050 I have larger bookshelves (Paradigm Monitor 5's) crossing over to the sub at 60hz (sometimes 80....still trying to see what sounds best). I am trying to determine what I'm missing, if anything, by not having a three-way floorstanding pair instead of the 5's. Can anyone help?

I'm currently moving towards floorstanding speakers myself. I have Spica TC-50s and an SVS 20-39cs sub and I just can't get them to blend properly. There is a big hole in the bass no matter where I put the sub, and no matter where i set the Xover. It sounds somewhat boomy, something I wanted to avoid. I haven't tried equalization, but I don't want yet another device in the signal path, nor in my rack at this point, no more room.

I've just started building a pair of Proac 2.5 clones that are discussed on the Madisound forum. These are a 2 way design that are supposed to be very musical, with bass down to 30hz. I don't think I'll use the sub when I'm listening to music, but probably would use it for HT for the shake. So for HT, you're probably OK with bookshelves, but for music you want the floorstanders. (But that's not to say that the opposite won't work and sound great too.)



[This message has been edited by zacster (edited October 25, 2002).]