Ever discover cheapo speakers actually sound...


Ever discover super inexpensive speakers sound really decent when main speakers are out of commision?
I am using my main system worth over $30k to play list ~$240 street price $125 speakers, and they sound amazing.
This reminds me of the discussion of when would you get a better sound using expensive amps and cheap speakers or expensive speakers and cheap amps.
pedrillo

Showing 2 responses by almarg

I would make an analogy to playing a poor quality recording on a very high quality system. As my system evolved over the years, my initial expectation was that the improvements in the system would make poor recordings sound worse, by reproducing them more accurately. But to my surprise I found that nearly every recording sounded better. I think the reason was that just about every recording gets something right, for instance, part of the mid-range, and my attention would be sub-consciously drawn to what was right about the recording, because it was SO right, and would not focus on what was wrong.

Probably the same kind of thing happens when a high quality system and recording is fed into poor speakers. The speakers manage to get some part of the spectrum right, and that is what captures our attention.

Regards,
-- Al
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