Help a confused newbie build his first setup...

"good sound throughout the house" - planar speakers have narrow sweet spot AFAIK.

Hello ,

Planar speakers and line sources in general will fill a house easy due to their dispersion characteristics, nothing to do with the "sweet spot " .

Point source speakers lose 6 db per doubling of distance, only 3 db for linesource/planer type speakers.

Regards,

Once we get far enough away from the speakers that the reverberant field dominates over the direct sound, it really doesn't matter whether the sound originated from a point source or a line source. And by the time we're outside the main listening room, the 3 dB per distance doubling falloff advantage of line source propagation is disrupted anyway.

Imho more important than line source vs point source propagation is the off-axis response smoothness, which will establish the tonal balance at greater-than-normal listening distances, whether on-axis or off or in the next room.

Duke
dealer/manufacturer

How big is the house?

I've heard from one dealer at least that one of his customers brought back in a loudspeaker that broke. Blew out. During discovery of how the buyer used the stereo system he bought from the dealer it was determined the customer had maxed out the volume so he could hear it while he worked outside of the house. Leaving it uop like that he eventaully blew the loudspeaker. It's a popular one seen around here often... but not up to the task of a PA system.

Looking at my own setups, my best ssytem produces the best sound. Period. In that room or outside of it. Within reason of course. Albeit, I don't use it as a Public Announcing system. If that was what I wanted... sheer volume... I'd go to Sam Ash or some likewise joint and get a P.A. outfit.

Sound quality is a product of ALL of the system components. The room. The speakers. The source device. The amplification. the system's setup itself. ALL OF IT is responsible for the quality of sound the system generates.

Down stream components can not recover what is not shown initially.

IOW the best speakers in the world can not reach back upstream and make up for inadequacies of the rig's front end... a less than source... modest preamp... poor amp... etc. They can only give you back that which you fed them.

Consequently, and often this note gets obscured by the "speaker first camp" devotees..... Signal integrity is the Holy Grail in audio.

Generate a quality signal first.... nothing downstream of your source item is going to make up for any loss or degredation, lack of fidelity or lack thereafter.

the thing the "speaker first group" leaves out almost everytime is this caveat.... it's encumbant upon the system builder to upgrade the upstream components as soon as possible so they are all on par with the investment you made initially by pitching the greatest part of your stereo budget into loudspakers, instead of elsewhere.

They also don't add in that for the more modest or budget minded audio buff, this might take a few years or even more than that to ultimately accomplish.

If it takes say 4 or even five years to wind up with a really nice front end... by then those great XYZ speakers are now five years old and have likely been superceded by some other itteration, revised, revamped, remade, improved, altered or changed somehow.

In the meantime the quality of the sound slowly improved as the source, power, etc. all improved.... marginally and slowly.

But then of course, if one loves to look at great speakers, that won't sound their best until the rest of the rig is up to snuff... well... then it's speakers that should garner the greatest portion of the budget immediately... I suppose.

...and that's my issue with that philosophy. "First". I've no issues with speakers eating up a big piece of the audio budget pie when all is said and done... just not right off the bat.

Naturally the same argument could be reversed as everything changes, gets altered & hopefully bettered. then too, there are those "keeper" pieces that aren't bettered and from them only different can be expected.

There's no question speakers make the biggest impact on your stereo. Nothing else will make qauite as big a difference. And you're forced to most often, look at 'em all the time.

....and what then if you decide to go flea power & high eff speakers? Or tube power? Or someone wants to remodel paint and redecorate in the next couple months?

Loud squeakers are important... but they ain't everything. to get started I'd split it up into thirds. A third on source, another third on power, and the last third on speakers. right after a system is in house, I'd begin addressing all the pheripherals and accessories. Room treatments, cab ling, isolation, power line artifacts... etc.

It'll sound good throughout the appropriate listening distance.

BTW... all my speakers, are cones or domes. I've no panel speakers. My House is under 2K sq ft too... and no amp I own has more than 200wpc @ 8ohms. I can hear my 93db speakers anywhere in the home if I choose and they are run by a 150wpc multi ch amp most of the time...otherwise power comes from a pr of 120 wpc mono blocks.. it sounds great to me.

Blindjim, I suspect that progress in speaker technology is much slower than progress in electronics especially in signal processing. Starting with the speaker makes more sense to me. As for the split, I would place 45% in electronics and equal amount in speakers. Cables should account for about 10%.