As I recall, a great man once said: Ask not what your speakers can do for you, but what you can do for your speakers!
that was very inspiring, don't you think?
If the notion that all we needed were great speakers, was true wed all have $15K - $30K speakers being run by iPods and this past time would cease to exist.
The next sound you hear should not be the speakers. Not if they are great speakers, that is.
We dont call these audio arrangements SYSTEMS for no good reason.
Everything matters! Everything. Fit the speakers to the room, the amp to the preamp and the speakers, and youself, and you should be good to go.
I happen have an Onkyo amp non digital, old school discrete. 140wpc or so they say. TX SR 805. An old school sony receiver too, and have a couple amps still around here, though more in recent history stopped by for a time.
Several pr of speakers still hang their hats here ranging from a few hundred to well into the thousands.
Guess what?
The best speakers IMO I own sound best with the best gear I own. Hands down, No questions. End of story. SO DO THE CHEAPEST SQUEAKERS I OWN SOUND BEST WITH MY BEST GEAR. Finis.
The diffs from my least expensive speakers, with my most modest kit, and the best speakers in house is minimal. Noticeable, but at best a marginal diff in Sound Q.
Quantifying it is tuff from memory only I can say perhaps a third better sounding? Give or take a wee bit. At best.
Thats going from my $400 two way cantons, to my Silverline Sonata IIIs that retailed for well over 6K more money!.
Is there more bandwidth being revealed by the Sonata IIIs than the two way Cantons? Sure. But the SQ relies on the signal path. The bandwidth displayed is the territory of the speakers.
Reproducing more of the bandwidth is another tale completely.
Actually I could very easily deal with having lesser quality speakers than I can with having lesser quality signal transmission line.
Very easily I could live with my standby former Flagship Phase Tech tower and my better electronics than I would want to live with merely my Sonata IIIs and my Onkyo Receiver.
No doubt though, speakers are the big deal. Large man symbols out on display. One cant but notice them! Get something cool! Fancy. Sharp looking. Big. Expensive speakers make great sounds!
Maybe. Maybe not.
They sure as Heck make a big splash on several levels though. I do admit that.
However, I feel very strongly about the philosophy of building a system from front to back, rather than back to front. Source first vs. speakers first.
Naturally you can go about it either way and you will too. Regardless what is pointed out here by other peoples exp in their various system builds.
Speakers will make the biggest alteration to your system than any other piece normally.
Thats the added advantage to building from front to back, by the time your ready to drop in some fancy and costly speakers, theyll be entering into a rig that is already hot to go and balanced electrically & electronically speaking.
and you will definitely know how honest the speakers are as you will have been auditioning various constructs all along the way. Youll also become quite familiar with just where those invisible borders of diminishing returns dwell.
In that philosophy too, you might well find out you dont have to hock your middle child for more speakerage.
I went to audition a pr of VSA VR4 Gen III. $6.5K $7.0K speakers. Took my amp along. A Krell KAV 250. Dedicated room treated room yada yada. Nice front end by Shan Lin, and Electrocompaniet preamp. All Audience wiring and Chang conditioning. Spent almost two hours listening to this and that. Felt quite unimpressed throughout the whole of that session so I decided to leave and no longer consider those VSA Gen III speakers as candidates.
Saying good bye to the dealer and adding Ill need to look elsewhere for other units, he bade me check out one more room first. I did.
In that room was an all Thor power train with the top tier Shan lin SACD CD player. Audience wires as before and Chang cond as in the other room. Now the outfit was 30 wpc vs 250 wpc and tubes vs. SS. The speakers again were VSA. VR4 JRs. Virtually half the cost of those just heard.
Listening to the exact same CD (s) as I had been previewing in the room next door, the first few notes I heard after receiving the remote control simply put, blew me away. Never in my life had I heard such incredible sound. Glorious. Astonishingly natural and organic. Decent bass too, though some improvement there was needed. Otherwise, 85 - 90% of the sound I was seeking lay right there in front of me!
So I bought those speakers.
Big mistake.
See, I was buying a sound.. a lie actually. Not speakers. It wasnt the speakers that were manufacturing that sound.
They merely allowed it.
I shudder to think as I reflect on all of that How great could have that Thor outfit sounded with still better speakers?
For the next two years or so I tried to emulate, duplicate, recapture as much as possible of that Thor tube sound using those JR speakers. To no avail.
Similar products though not the exact same were brought in to reproduce the system I had heard. No dice. Nada.
Only that front end could make that sound. Not the spakers. In fact, those speakers needed that sort of front end to sound that good. With lesser gear, they sounded well, lets say just not so good and leave it at that.
I dare say this is as pertinent as it would be with SS power trains too. Krell has a decidedly different sound than does Levinson, and McIntosh SS has a different sound than does Sony, etc.
I sifted my way thru a heap of cables, inordinate numbers of speaker placements to the point my floor was becoming Swiss Cheese Lorraine, I think or perhaps jarlsberg. Differing amps, preamps, even a couple different sources on the same economic levels as what was originally previewed that distant day, flew in, nested and then migrated off into the wilds. Zip. Sorry. I ultimately came close but no dice.
Later on, by acquiring a Thor line stage pre amp and added it into that mix with a BAT vk500 w/BAT pk, and felt then that was the best I could afford to do with that pr of speakers, and that was enough too. I had had it by then.
With respect to all the VSA owners, I was done trying to get great sound out of those JRs. They arent for me at all. Check please. Im finished. Next!
It is indeed what is up[ front that counts. If the quality of the signal is not inherently true prior to its explosion from the speakers, it sure as Hell wont regain or become infused with more Truth & love juice as it emerges from the transducers.
It matters not how good the speakers are . Within reason. They will only exude what they receive they wont recan it or revitalize it. Purify it more, add to it or requalify it again well, not if they are pretty good speakers.
Aint great speakers supposed to be neutral & transparent?
Im pretty sure thats why they call it a system. It takes EVERyTHING in it to generate an engaging audio event.
In my case the speakers I heard producing the sound that intoxicated me so magically that day were only a tad more than half the price of the ones I went there to hear!
But the front end of both rigs were quite different. Pricewise and topology too. the Thor outfit ran into $20K all by itself. The Electrocompainet and Krell added up to about $6 - $7K. total, give or take a few denaro.
The speakers too, to be fair here were different sorts one wearing a negligee as a modest covering, the second, adorned by veneers and woods.
Irrespective of the two setups, night and day diffs were instantly noticeable. Blatantly. They continue to be too . if the front end is up to the task.
Such remains my own experience.
I feel too some of the biggest considerations are matching of each item along the signal pathway. Though some call it synergy. Impedance matching all thru the system is mandatory for a great sounding arrangement. It is as important as with the upstream component as it is in the relationship between the amp and the speakers.
The amp has to satisfy two task masters. The source or preamp feeding the signal to it, and the speakers it must control and feed thereafter.
Miss on the upstream imp mataching, and the downstream output is going to be way less than good or just good at its best.
Despite where you begin until you have the system on a par throughout itself, balanced electrically with respect to impedance, from its source (s) to its loud speakers, youll not be receiving its best effort and Ill say no matter how much $$$ youlaid out for those fancy squeakers ya got.
If you want good to great sound quickly, then go the front to back route. If you can deal with decent sound until your power train, and source are up to speed, then going off for a pr of high end squeakers is the likely way for you that is of course unless your significant other is in the remodeling mood frequently . If so, then speakers are normally the first things to be examined as something to change.
Lastly, if you have the duckets to drop as considerably on the power train as you are or can on speakers, all bets are off and then its merely matching things up as to their needs and your preffs.
Like the old cigarette commercial said, its whats up front that counts!
Hearing speakers which are capable of sounding great very much depends on what is making them sound great and never will it be the other way around!