Ever discover cheapo speakers actually sound...

If it was not clear distortion or similar noise you heard early on, its possible that the speakers just sounded better after a while because your ears adjusted to the different sound.

I'd like to see a picture of your entire listening room, but I'm suspecting that you might just have tight quarters that might call for a smaller box in order to breathe and sound open and free. That is a good thing perhaps because in general a smaller speaker should cost less to get right than a larger one.

A lot of people fear omnis and their room interactions, but with my pseudo-omni Ohms, I'm finding these are actually less sensitive to room acoustics and easier to place for good sound than other box and planar designs I've used. So I think omnis, again if not too large, are not a bad thing to be considering, but a smaller conventional box speaker design might be able to fit the bill as well.

Ojgalli

Like the formula for Coca Cola, your point is written down and locked away in a vault somewhere deep within the Bose corporate headquarters.

Bravo!

cwlondon

Re-enforces the source first theory espoused by Linn an Naim.

I think the statements by RockV and Ojgalli are somewhat reconcilable (and perhaps mostly reconcilable) if we accept that at least some of the sonic differences between different high quality upstream components are audible through low quality speakers.

And I think that is probably true. Obviously speakers and their interaction with the room are typically much bigger determinants of overall sound quality than electronics. But given the many factors and complexities that are involved in accurate music reproduction (a frequency spectrum that is many octaves wide; dynamic range that is orders of magnitude wide; transient response and recovery; imaging, etc., etc.), it stands to reason that if the low quality speakers get just a little bit of this complexity right, equipment-dependent differences in what is being fed into them will be perceivable.

Regards,
-- Al

Almarg,

There is another explanation that works too - if the coloration and distortion from the $240 speakers is subjectively preferred to the much better $10K speakers then you have it. After all, hyper compressed rock/pop music may sound more pleasant on a boombox or a car audio system than a revealing system - especially if all that the $10K speakers do is to better reveal distortion on the recording (mechanical distortion from bad speakers is often better to hear than precisely represented electronic distortion from clipped waveforms on a hyper compressed CD - think Metallica!)