Quote Originally Posted by kexodusc
How large is your room? Most decent bookshelves in the price your looking at will have excellent quality bass below 40 Hz. The bass they do have will have good sound quality, might not thump as much as a tower. The other octaves should be much better though. It's never as easy as I'm making it seem, these are generalizations, but they reflect a trend. If your sub is capable, I'd suggest you'd be further ahead getting high quality bookshelf speakers to take care of the mids and highs (better than a tower could) and use your sub for that last ocatave. Most people tend to do this with their towers anyway.

This is what I do. My towers have higher quality Vifa/Scan-speak drivers and much better crossover parts. They cost me more to build than 3 pairs of my bookshelf speakers in my home theater, yet with the sub, the difference overall isn't as big as you'd think.

Of course, there's definitely the cool factor in having towers, and you know better than I how your sub sounds. Go out and listen to yourself, especially vocals and strings, to hear the difference between a $2000 bookshelf and tower. Then make your decision.

The room is in 2 sections in a straight line, living room and dining area, kinda sucks but Im renting a house because I'm stationed in Japan for another year still. The room is 23' front to back 14' side to side where I have it set up and the full area is 35' X 14'. As for the bass I'm using a SVS 20-29 PC-Plus sub which is the best that I have heard besides the SVS PB-12 Ultra/2 that my friend has which is nuts, he put a 6 foot crack in the wall watching Incredibles lol. Like I said I'm new and by no means an expert in any area of HT. I just know what sounds good to me. Have you heard any SVS subs? And if you have do you consider them a good sub? Astetics are important to me, but not at the cost of quality. I would like to see towers but if the sound will be better with bookshelves thats the direction I'm heading. As of right now I can't go listen to them personally because I'm stuck overseas. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to put links in here but here is a link to the sub and speakers, and I'm not advertising for SVS just trying to get some help with my setup. By the way Thank you to all of you guys for helping me try to learn about speakers and setup's maybe in a year or so I can help someone else lol.

http://www.svsound.com/products-sub-cyl-plpow2.cfm
http://www.svsound.com/products-spks-sbs01.cfm