I would absolutely consider passive full-range speakers with independently adjustable bass. I have no issues with external equalization.
I would be comfortable putting the front baffle of the speaker as far as 8 ft away from the back wall.
The Timbre of my voice is fine in the room. The decay is somewhat compromised, I have measured the rt60 before and the number escapes me but it was definitely no where as good as my theater. It was not too bad mind you.
Thank you for this additional information. Imo you do not need any "room treatment"; you just need good quality, very-high-SPL-capable speakers whose reflections have the same spectral balance as their direct sound. And imo this is why you want to minimize any spectral discrepancy between the two:
"If the spectra of the direct and reflected sounds are significantly different, the reflections are likely to be more noticeable, from subtle timbral effects up to a premature breakdown of the precedence effect." - Floyd Toole
I have been recommended line arrays a few times and I'm aware of the concept of decreased SPL dropoff. I just have never seen any frequency response or dispersion graphs, or distortion data for that matter pertaining to them.
Some years ago I had a home demo room that was 33 feet (10 meters) long. I'm a dealer for a line-source-approximating speaker (SoundLab faceted-curved fullrange electrostats), so I took pink noise measurements of a point-source-approximating loudspeaker and the SoundLabs at 1 meter and also back at 8 meters (the practical maximum with the SoundLabs set up correctly). From 1 meter to 8 meters, the point-source-approximating speaker's SPL fell off by 11 decibels. Point source theory predicts a 6 decibel falloff for each doubling of distance, not counting the contribution of in-room reflections. That would theoretically have been an 18 decibel falloff (three doublings of distance), so evidently the in-room reflections were making a 7 decibel contribution back at 8 meters.
Line source theory predicts a 3 dB falloff per doubling of distance. So that would be 9 decibels of falloff, not counting the in-room reflections. The line-source-approximating dipolar SoundLabs fell off by only 4 decibels over the same distance, indicating that the in-room reflections were contributing about 5 decibels at 8 meters.
So in my experience, in a suitable room, a good line-source-approximating loudspeaker's output really does fall off more slowly with distance.
Unfortunately I do not think you can expect a line-source-approximating loudspeaker to behave as well in your room because of your tall ceilings. Let me explain:
The floor and ceiling reflections extend the virtual height of a line-source-approximating loudspeaker, effectively trippling the array height according to Sound Lab designer Roger West. But in order for this to happen, the bottom of the line-source-approximating speaker needs to be very close to the floor, and the top needs to be very close to the ceiling. Your ceiling is so tall that, unless you have custom hyper-tall line-source-approximating speakers made, the ceiling will be too far away for its reflection to effectively extend the array in that direction.
Also, most "line array" type loudspeakers have very wide horizontal dispersion and therefore significant sidewall interaction, and in a room the size of yours I think the resulting abundance of early-onset reflections (combined with the direct-to-reverberant ration being reduced by the listening distance anyway) would work against clarity.
So in general I would not recommend a line array loudspeaker system for your room.
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