I’ve had a Peachtree MusicBox amp & speakers collecting dust and I’d like to use it my study to reap the benefits of a stand-alone amp and justify the impulse buy. Firstly, I had to ensure that it was a step up from my current active monitors (Aktimate Micros) so I picked out a few good songs by Lorde, Dido and Crowded House and tried a couple of different speaker combinations. These included B&W LM1s (normally my HT rears) and the bundled Peachtree MB3s. The source components being a Surface Pro 3 streaming 44.1khz FLAC files from my NAS and a Musical Fidelity VDAC II. Neither of these speakers impressed me in the slightest, so I’m looking for ideas on some suitable near-field speakers to pair up with the MusicBox. As they will be sitting on a desk, I’d really be looking for smaller boxes (likely 5 inch bass drivers) and given the limited power of the MusicBox (20 WRMS @ 8ohms), they will need to be fairly efficient with 4-8 ohm load acceptable.
Being a second system, I'd like to keep the budget to around $500 which is fairly limiting, but willing to look at used items as well. Some speakers that come to mind:
Peachtree D4
B&W 686 s2
KEF LS50 (over the budget but well regarded and used successfully in a near-field setup by others on this forum)