Ever discover cheapo speakers actually sound...

When I first turned on the inexpensive jbl's, they sounded horrible, but after some time improved tremendously?

I missed this post....clearly you do have a problem somewhere - it us likely intermittent from what you report. Speakers do not sound horrible and then sound good.

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