When a budget speaker is preferred to a high end one...

Does anyone out there listen to the Sophia speakers?

I have a remarkably good-sounding pair of unlabeled speakers purchased in China when living there. They look suspiciously like the Sophia product.

Considering the inordinate amount of garbage stockpiled into a Harbeth bookshelf speaker (like there was a contest to see which network could be the most complicated piece of junk anyone could produce on design day), it is not at all surprising to hear that a less expensive and well engineered speaker could wipe the room with them. While you didn’t mention brand, I did. Imagine what they could sound like if you could improve them. But you can’t. You’d have to go external to make any headway. Trying to replace all the cheap Chinese scraps in the network with quality components would be cost prohibitive in the face of the initial outlay and the fact that the cheaper parts are smaller. No room to do a straight swap in their bookshelf designs. 

I own four sets of loudspeakers. My Large Advents and B&W M805's were re-worked by John L of Van L Speaker Works with new internal wiring and X-overs. My Devore O/93's and Spendor D7.2's do not suffer-I am pretty darned sure-from the maladies you describe. 

But all that said, emphasizing the quality of the internals when there are so many other factors at play-driver quality, enclosure quality, overall design is a bit much. 

I can't agree with you at all @fsonicsmith . Give me those Magicos and cheap but competent electronics with the room to match. I need a good turntable setup for some cherished recordings. The rest it's easy to find.

@ghdprentice wrote:

This had definitely never happened to me. I research the daylights out of stuff… and speakers typically audition many. I take audio purchases very seriously.

So do I. Have heard my fair share of speakers over the last some 4 decades, and one thing is clear: design and overall implementation matters the very most, and adhering to physics. Expensive parts (and looks) only goes so far, and they don’t guarantee better sonic results - sometimes they even make them worse.

Proper design implementation in a speaker doesn’t come without cost, nor do designs that dictate size with the extra material cost here, but what takes expense to sometimes astronomical levels is luxury cabinetry and expensive drive units and XO parts - without them being strictly necessary from a sonic perspective, if you ask me. Not to mention acoustic treatment for highly and non-controlled dispersive speakers (as they’re most), which can be very expensive as pre-developed and -assembled products.

Peter Snell used almost dirt cheap drivers in his original speaker designs, but they sounded great and were highly respected among audiophiles. He understood the importance of design parameters, close tolerances and implementation as that which really matters, and it paid off. Bob Smith of the now sadly discontinued S.P. Technology speaker range (known for their relatively large dome tweeter-loaded waveguides) had a similar outset; why use a (much) more expensive Scan-Speak Revelator dome tweeter when a cheaper SB Acoustics variant with low fs and the right parameters overall was equally, or even a better fit in the used waveguide? WLM Audio speakers is another example: their previous, great sounding Diva model sported a relatively cheap 10" Eminence coaxial driver, and it easily held on to (also with its own unique qualities) times more expensive exotic driver-fitted high-end speakers, not only to my ears.

Not trying to say very good sounding speakers (given proper acoustical and setup conditions and all that jazz) can avoid being sometimes expensive, for obvious reasons, but such a well designed and -implemented speaker could easily be regarded as relative "budget" compared to an all-out über-luxury ditto with expensive everything from cabinetry and drivers to XO, and still hold its own sonically. As such I’ve heard quite a few relatively "budget" speakers that equaled, or even bettered much more expensive high-end luxury items.