Interesting take on sound equipment from Siegfried Linkwitz - http://www.linkwitzlab.com/ALMA'14/Sound_quality.htm

That is an interesting post, though I found this a bit strange "Absorbers, diffusers and electronic room equalization will change the sound, but these are only remedies to an improperly designed loudspeaker."

First of all, room treatments, either active or passive, shouldn't be lumped in with cables and "tweak" products, whatever your opinion of those may be. Room treatments are an entirely different can of worms, and there's plenty of real science behind them as opposed to stuff like Synergistic Research magic nonsense.

Unless you're purpose building a room from scratch to be an acoustic space, you will absolutely benefit from adding treatments and/or using some form of EQ, even with a "properly" designed loudspeaker. The only type of speaker that is largely ambivalent to the space its placed in is a flow resistance type, but that only applies to mid and high frequencies. The bass still has to be dealt with, and many completely untreated rooms can have swings of +/- 20dB or more in the bass region. I don't care how good of a speaker designer you are and how "proper" your designs are, you're not getting around that.

Much later in the post it then goes on to talking about treating with a LEDE approach, which seems to contradict the earlier bit about treatments and their usefulness.

My impression was that Linkwitz advocates that a hi-fi speaker should perform admirably in less-than-dead rooms. Yet his LX521  system does require some treating - the back wall must be diffusive. In the coming weeks I will have a chance to audition the said Linkwitz speakers - in theory it all sounds good, but all of these extra amps might or might not be worth the extra hassle for some.

Yeah the post makes it pretty clear that you need a fairly large room so that the speakers can be placed well away from reflective surfaces. The ultimate goal in terms of the time delay of reflections is essentially the same as with Audio Kinesis designs, they just go about getting there in very different ways.

Any suggestions for something preferably between $1-1.5k (2k max)? Used is fine. Any suggestions would be great, and I can do some research from there.

Hoping to find something that does great with EDM, acoustic, rock, metal, and pop. Soundstaging and 3Dness is really important to me. I like a darker and more neutral signature, and don't like bright-sounding gear.

I think marv's suggestion is a good one, especially taking your space into consideration. Getting even half way decent bass response is going to be a real challenge, and a couple of good subs perhaps combined with DSPeaker anti-mode boxes will probably get you much better results than huge $10K floorstanders that will simply overload everything and make your room sound like a '92 Civic stuffed full of Kickers. The alternative is to simply forgo everything below about 45Hz, but given your choice of genres, that probably won't be satisfactory.

On the used market right now, there's a pair of PSB Platinum M2s on Agon at $975 with stands, not a bad deal at all. Next, a potentially great choice is the pair of Amphion Argon 2 Anniversarys at $1450. That's quite the deal right there. The Amphion trades sensitivity for extension and bass impact, so while they will need at least a half decent amount of power, they've got plenty of guts. The enclosure is conventional rather than flow resistance like their flagships, but they DO use the same tweeter and waveguide arrangement as their FR models, and that should make them pretty easy to position.

Finally, there's a pair of Merlin TSM-MMIs at $1950. No BAM to worry about with the TSM, and they are a sealed box design so they have no real issues with close wall placement. The TSM has been around forever, but Bobby keeps coming up with new tweaks to keep them competitive, and they're still one of my personal favs. There's been so many revisions that it's hard to keep track, and I can't remember exactly where the MMI fits within the timeline, but I'm pretty sure the MMI is recent enough to have the Renaissance MST-30.5 and Morel MW 164 drivers, so they should be easily upgradable to the current TSM-MXM status if you want to do that.

For new speakers, I would take a look at the Ascend Sierra 2, Vapor Sound Breeze or Stiff Breeze, Fritz Carbon 7, and Odyssey's Epiphony IV. The IV is brand new and not on the site yet, and according to Klaus, they start at $995/pr, with upgrade options very likely. In his words, they are "UNFREAKINGBELIEVABLEARYOUFUCKINGKIDDINGMEHOWISTHISPOSSIBLE !!!!" 

At this price level, factory direct models are definitely king. Skylan stands should be able to fit any of them, or you might want to get the adjustable Reference 3A stands instead so you can try different speakers on it and adjust the height as necessary. A BIG plus to these two-way monitors as compared to monstro floorstanders is that you can have them shipped to you from the factory, try 'em in your own room, and if you're not happy, just pack them back up and send 'em back. All of the factory direct sellers have trial periods, usually at least a month. No crates or pallets, freight trucks, or piano movers required.

That depends whether you value extension before naturalness and coherence. I don't like the sub sat feel myself. I am more into full range panels and floorstanders. Bookshelf monitors typically have a boxiness to their sound that I don't like that much. Floorstanders with small speakers like vandersteens are something I like more. They don't sound boxy relative to many other dynamic driver speakers in the same price range.

It should be added that bookshelf speakers plus a sub will be MUCH better in the bang/buck ratio.

hello,

those of us in mid-fi land heartily agree!