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

We used to be small time commercial bee keepers.  I realized at some point that if i wanted to make any money the honey had to cost a lot.  

So, we did very nice packaging and branding (i used to be in marketing) and sold it at the most expensive market around.  When we negotiated the price I said that I wanted to be the most expensive honey on the shelf and have the standard mark up. 

Since most beekeepers are horrible marketers our honey sold like crazy with hundreds of jars selling out in hours.  We charged wholsale more than the others we're charging retail.  Another outlet we did custom branding for sold our honey for double what others were getting retail. 

When people evaluate for quality price is a huge part of what they use to determine quality.  

With speakers the elephant in the room is usually the room. You play the cards your dealt in that department but nobody really likes to talk about it because it's too complicated to talk about and too individual. Fixing a room isn't as fun as unboxing expensive new speakers and discussing them. 

At this point in history for most rooms good sound is pretty darn cheap. New components are designed using maths unimaginable in the near past. Speaker and amp design isn't rocket science. Setting snake oil aside you can have an excellent sounding system for very short money these days. 

The used market is also affordable unless you need to have the same vintage piece that everyone else must have. 

Confirmation bias is so strong in audio that it's basically inseparable. If you managed to realize that a cheaper speaker can sound very good, you're one the few. Congratulations. 

Years ago I had Mirage M1si speakers driven by a Krell KSA-250 amp and in my very open room it sounded great. After my move to a smaller house (divorce) I sold it all and ended up with a simple NAD receiver and Triangle Titus XS stand mount speakers. Strange as it may seem the NAD/Triangle sound was pretty amazing. A little bright that I tamed with positioning and wall covers but overall it was good. I still have the Triangles stored in my closet as they have been replaced but it was a good transition to a great sounding speaker on a budget. 

Outstanding posts!

If I recall correctly,the Dahlquist DQ-10 used a $5 Motorola piezo as a "super tweeter". Not many of us will dispute the legitimacy of this speaker as one of the most impactful speakers of our time. Genius has a way of leap frogging price barriers. You may remember a young man who built a 700 watt power amp inside a Folgers coffee can years ago? Then there are those occasions where all the stars line up, and gifted hands (and, minds) are given the freedom to operate without limitations. This is where the ground trembles (sometimes, literally) in my view, and the "state of the art" takes a giant leap forward.

A couple more comments on "budget speakers":

As a modder/hot rodder of hifi gear, we learned pretty early that the raw drivers are not necessarily the weakest link in the chain. When things are removed/replaced that "make things sound worse" the sonic results can be stunning. When the audio signal is presented in very good shape to the tensil leads on the raw drivers, "audiophile characteristics" suddenly appear, and the magic happens. Very consistently.

@fsonicsmith Well done with the Advent and B&W mods. My guess is that they retained the sonic "personality" that you loved about them, but are now infinitely more musical. Money well spent.

John

I think there is a calibration point below which a speaker cannot compete with something more expensive. To take an extreme case, a $200 speaker will very rarely sound better to the ttypical ears compared to a $2000 speaker. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but that’s my sense of things. So at what point is the cut off? Is a pair of $800 speakers likely to be able to sound better to any given individual than something that cost four times as much? I think it depends on one’s ears and whether one is in a used or new market. At any rate, when I am considering purchases like speakers I try to start off looking just beyond what I consider to be the calibration point and then go upward as necessary to find something I like. 

It all depends upon the room and how the speakers integrate into the rest of the system.  With the right components, inexpensive speakers can sound really good.

I have had NHT Super Zero 2.1 speakers in my secondary system for around twelve years. Over this time, I have made upgrades to the my system that have made these $100 speakers sound better and and better.

The NHT speakers are the Front and Center speakers in a 5.1 Yamaha AVR system with a sub woofer.  The speakers are perfect for the room because they are small and can be mounted on the top of the wall on mounts that are aimed slightly down.  These acoustic suspension speakers sound great despite being mounted almost flush to the wall.

As I have progressed from streaming via an Apple TV/Apple Music via Airplay to Roon through Airplay to an Orchard Audio Pecan Pie streamer/DAC as a Roon Endpoint, the two channel sound quality kept improving.

Recently, my old sub woofer died and I replaced it with an SVS 3000 Micro sub woofer.  Between fine tuning the programmable sub woofer and changing crossover setting to the SVS recommended 120 Hz, the sound quality for music increased significantly.  The SQ on my secondary system has gotten much closer to the sound quality of my much more expensive primary 2 channel system.

The point of all of this is that in my case, inexpensive speakers that are well suited to the room can be tweaked to sound really good.  The Siuper Zero's might be the least expensive component in my system, but they do not hold back the sound at all.