Hi all, first time poster here, so please be patient of my JBL ignorance.
After a few decades using Martin Logan electrostats and Dynaudio dynamic speakers, I've decided I want to make a change in my main living room speakers. The change was driven by the purchase of a set of JBL LSR305s for my office. For those not familiar, the LSR305 is an active speaker with a 5" woofer and a soft dome tweeter mounted to a wave guide. While still budget speakers, I was impressed with their performance for the price, particularly their dispersion, soundstaging, and impactful dynamics.
I realized that my current living room speakers have been weak in the areas that JBLs seem to be good: the electrostats have low distortion and great resolution, but limited dynamic impact. The Dynaudios have great tonal balance, good imaging, unfatiguing, but start to sound compressed at higher volumes.
I'm now really interested in getting that JBL sound in my medium sized living room (about 14' x 20', carpeted, concrete slab floor). Analog source is a Michell Gyro SE, Jelco SA-750D, Nagaoka MP-500 feeding a Fi Yph phono stage. Digital is streaming from Roon to AppleTV. Electronics are a Wyred4Sound mPRE (balanced analog preamp plus DAC) and 2 x mAMP (monoblock power amps).
Music is everything: jazz, blues, classical, opera classic rock, some pop or world.
I'm really attracted to both the new studio monitor series (the blues ones sold mostly outside North America) as well as vintage models. Budget for speakers is <$5k.
The 4429 seem really interesting, but wondering if they're too big for my room. Also like the looks of the 4306, might be a better size for my room, but also wondering if they're going to have serious low-end or loudness limits given their size and 2-way nature.
In contrast, there is a bewildering selection of vintage JBLs out there...about which I know very little, other than vague childhood memories from the 1970s-1980s of systems I admired as a kid.
Long prelude aside:
Are the new blue "studio monitors" sold in Europe and Asia regarded as better, similar, or inferior to their vintage counterparts?
And which vintage models should I be looking at for a medium size room?