Hello maxfance and welcome to the forum!

While most of the members on this forum are from the USA there are still quite a few non-US based members who will be able to give you advice on what is available in Europe within the price ranges that you listed.

Even though I live in the US I did live for a over a year in the Netherlands and during that time I used a Cambridge Audio Azur 650A integrated amplifier to power a pair of Energy speakers that I had shipped from the USA.

Another integrated amplifier which I highly recommend is the Audio Refinement "Complete". I'm not sure if this unit is still available new however you may be able to find one used and if so don't hesitate to buy it.

As for loudspeakers I am unfamiliar with the European market and will not offer you any misleading advice.

Finally may I suggest that you also post your original message in the following sections of the forum so that more members will it:

"The Entry Level", "Loudspeakers" and "Amplification"

Hello maxfrance,

A couple of pieces of advice.

• In a room that small, assuming it has parallel walls (i.e. square or rectangular) your problem will be controlling the bass rather than getting enough of it, 'clean and clear' will be surprisingly hard to achieve. I would strongly advise concentrating your search on speakers that work well near room boundaries. Bigger is definitely not better in your situation.
• A pair of quality small/medium-sized stand mounts should drive that room perfectly well and may offer better fidelity than similarly priced floor-standers. I have found this to be true on several occasions.
• I would not recommend getting hung-up on bi-amping, bi-wiring etc. At this point. Get some quality components that you like the sound of.

Equipment at this price level is not my area of expertise but rest assured that there is a huge choice. If it were my money I would be looking for something like a Naim NAIT 5 and Dynaudio MC-15 plus decent stands and cables. Very hard to beat for sound quality at that price level but probably equalled by many.

Bear also in mind that you pretty much double your purchasing power if you're prepared to consider used equipment.

Good luck!

Good and sound advice. Dynaudio entry level speakers could also be an option! Like for example the DM series.

Hello and welcome! Glad to have you on the bus! Hey, have you ever tried saving your music files as full size wav files? If you are interested, have some fun and compare an mp3 with the full size file and see what you think.

I liked the way the full size files sounded so I got an inexpensive terabyte drive to hold my music. Now I listen to the big files and really enjoy them a lot. Give it a try!

Trey

Quote:
Hello and welcome! Glad to have you on the bus! Hey, have you ever tried saving your music files as full size wav files? If you are interested, have some fun and compare an mp3 with the full size file and see what you think.

I liked the way the full size files sounded so I got an inexpensive terabyte drive to hold my music. Now I listen to the big files and really enjoy them a lot. Give it a try!

Trey

Trey,

There is no difference (to my ears at least) between a full size wav file (meaning uncompressed) and a losslessly compressed wav (in any one of the many lossless formats: flac, apple lossless, ape, wma lossless, etc.). There is a difference between a wav file and an mp3 file, regardless of the bit rate used in the mp3 file.

Have you used any the lossless formats? There a clear advantages to using these file formats: smaller file size and the ability to add meaningful file tags. Just about all of my hard drive based music is stored as flac files. Last night I was listening to the deluxe, remastered version of Love's "Forever Changes" and boy did it sound good as a streamed flac file sent wirelessly to my Transporter->Sim Audio->Vandersteen system. I have yet to A-B this version of "Forever Changes" with my old vinyl copy. To be fair the vinyl never sounded all that great, there being some unintended distortion in several places, and besides my used copy was never that great to begin with. In any event, the flac version sounded wonderful - clear, uncluttered and with a good late 1960's stereo mix. Very nice indeed.