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Speakers Don’t Matter As Much As We Think They Do?

When discussing how best to invest money into your system, it’s very common to hear people say, “Spend as much as you can afford on speakers, and then worry about the other gear because speakers have the largest effect on the sound.”

Now it’s never a bad idea to have good speakers and while I somewhat followed that advice early on, as my system has evolved it seems that I am not currently following that advice, and yet I am getting absolutely fantastic sound. For example as a percentage of my total system cost, my speakers cost 15%. If you include the subwoofers, that price is about 35%.

Early on I was worried I would outgrow my speakers and I’d hit their limit which would restrict sonic improvement potential as I upgraded other gear but that hasn’t been the case. With each component upgrade, things keep sounding better and better. The upper limit to speakers’ potential seems to be a lot higher than previously thought as I continue to improve upon the signal I send them and continue to improve system synergy. If you send a really high quality signal to a pair of speakers and get synergy right, they will reward you in spades and punch well above their apparent weight class.

One thing that may be working in my favor is that I’ve had these speakers since the early days of building my system so literally everything down to the last cable has been tuned to work in synergy with these speakers. Had I upgraded my speakers mid way through, I would have undone a lot of the work that went into the system in terms of synergy.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with their speakers? Does anyone have any extreme percentages in terms of speaker cost to system cost like 5% or 95% and what has been your experience?

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Showing 1 response by prof

prof
3,435 posts
 
A good room is transformative, and can make a lot of speakers sound really great.


Agreed Erik.

My listening room was renovated by an architect friend in consultation with an acoustician. It’s just a great sounding room. In fact, I’ve been surprised by guests who are totally non-audiophiles who, when sitting in the room only speaking, remark on the sound of the room! Things like "Wow, listen to our voices, it sounds so nice in this room."

I’ve been able to drop speakers of many types in to the room and it’s been a snap to get excellent sound.
As for the importance of speakers, that was impressed upon me earlier on in my audiophile life by a number of experiences. First was having my mind blown upon first hearing Quad ESL 63s at a friend’s place. He had a cheap amp and radio-shack wire but the transparency and presentation was another world from most other speakers of my experience.

Another time was after a truly mammoth speaker search (flying around north America to hear tons of great speakers) I ended up visiting John Otvos of Waveform. He gave a demo of his Mach 17 speakers for my friend and me, with very deliberately cheap amps (Kenwood or the like as I remember) and no-name cables. Yet it was just about the best sound I’d ever heard. Made most other speakers (including those hooked up to gazillion dollar amps/cables) sound like they were trying.It was the speaker design that made the difference.

On the other hand, I’ve been able to have incredibly enjoyable sound hooking up a variety of speakers, from expensive to small and modest, in my room and powered by my CJ tube amps. So I also get the "any decent speaker can sound great if optimized in a room/system" thing too.



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