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Speakers Don’t Matter As Much As We Think They Do?

When discussing how best to invest money into your system, it’s very common to hear people say, “Spend as much as you can afford on speakers, and then worry about the other gear because speakers have the largest effect on the sound.”

Now it’s never a bad idea to have good speakers and while I somewhat followed that advice early on, as my system has evolved it seems that I am not currently following that advice, and yet I am getting absolutely fantastic sound. For example as a percentage of my total system cost, my speakers cost 15%. If you include the subwoofers, that price is about 35%.

Early on I was worried I would outgrow my speakers and I’d hit their limit which would restrict sonic improvement potential as I upgraded other gear but that hasn’t been the case. With each component upgrade, things keep sounding better and better. The upper limit to speakers’ potential seems to be a lot higher than previously thought as I continue to improve upon the signal I send them and continue to improve system synergy. If you send a really high quality signal to a pair of speakers and get synergy right, they will reward you in spades and punch well above their apparent weight class.

One thing that may be working in my favor is that I’ve had these speakers since the early days of building my system so literally everything down to the last cable has been tuned to work in synergy with these speakers. Had I upgraded my speakers mid way through, I would have undone a lot of the work that went into the system in terms of synergy.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with their speakers? Does anyone have any extreme percentages in terms of speaker cost to system cost like 5% or 95% and what has been your experience?

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Showing 1 response by pinemountainclub

pinemountainclub
16 posts
 
The problems is that excellent speakers can sound real bad if the rest of your equipment is not up to par, and an average quality speakers will produce more satisfying sound instead. The reason for this is that, high quality speakers are extremely reviling and will easily pick up on your system problems - whether it is your source, amplifier, cables and specially your preamplifier. If you thing that there are a lot of good preamplifiers out there, which will easily enhance the performance of your system, think again - most likely you don’t have good sounding equipment and eventually you’ll be unsatisfied with the sound and look somewhere else - unless you cannot hear very well, so it really doesn’t matter so much to you.
Sound quality has become my choice of drug, and yes I’m an addict when it comes to that. Good sounding system is not good enough for me. It’s got to be better than that - magical, and extremely emotional so you can feel the rush into your entire body and brain and you cannot stop listening for hours, until 3:00AM the next day.  That’s what I call a good drug.
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