Which speakers are best for home?

[ChesterWoods]

Hello friends,
Currently, my house has just been built and I want to buy speakers for my living room. Currently on the market there are many speaker brands, so I don't know which speaker company to choose, hope everyone can help me.
Thank you very much.

 

[Martaine2005]

Speaker brand is very much an individual taste and opinion.
A variety of speakers are available from bookshelf, free standing, ceiling mounted, active etc.
If you want audiophile nonsense, get a large bank loan.
Many factors are involved in speaker choice. Room size, acoustics, amplifier and of course personal opinion.
Also your furnishings and decor may play a part in your speaker choice.
What brands do you prefer? Lets start there.

Martin

 

[shrtrnd]

I don't know where you're at, or what stores are available in your area.
As Martaine2005 said, if it matters to you, the style and sound quality are individual taste options.
I would go to a store that has a speaker display hooked-up to actually listen to a variety of speakers, and then choose.
The ones I've seen have an amplifier hooked-up through a switch-box to many different sets of speakers and you can
select all the different speaker pairs to listen to them.
Good luck with whatever you select.

 

[VenomBallistics]

this isn't exactly the best place for such a question. This is more a place to ask how to build them.
However, we are aware of many gallons of snake oil and marketing wank applied to goods in this field.
Use your ears and tune out everything else.

 

[bertus]

Hello,

Perhaps the following forum might fit better for your question:
https://www.diyaudio.com/

Bertus

 

[TCSC47]

It depends on what you want to spend and how good your hearing is, of course.

If you live in the UK, I would recommend you go to one of your local Richer Sounds shops https://www.richersounds.com/
I like the fact that they are part owned by their employees. More firms should be like that, sharing their profits with their workers rather than filling the pockets of their directors and share holders.

Also Richer Sounds are not snobbish like some of my local HiFi sellers. I went into my local Bose agent to ask about a decent DAB tuner and the guy looked at me in disgust! Not high enough quality for them. And £3k for a couple of speakers!? You know what you can do with that!

My wife bought me a pair of Mission M73i speakers from Richer because she was fed up with my half finished KEF based homemade speakers messing up our lounge. Luckily she allowed one of my sons to choose the model and I got a decent floor standing speaker which I wanted. Left to my wife I would be listening to the smallest speakers possible. To be fair to her however, she did buy me a didy, but really excellent Sony Bluetooth speaker for personal listening, which I am amazed at how good it sounds. Mind you, I think she might have been trying to make a point.

Also I would always encourage people to buy from their local shops rather than on line, particularly things like speakers, which if you want to do it properly, you need to listen to. Shops are responding to the competition from the likes of Amazon nowadays and prices are good. Use it or loose it, as they say.

 

[TCSC47]

If some here wondered at my term, DAB I have just seen that they don't use it in the USA. Basically in the UK it is digital broadcasting on frequencies around 500MHz or so and has become as popular as FM around 100MHz or maybe even more so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting
It is lower quality than FM but is good enough for my ears. Hence the snobby Bose salesman looking down upon me when I asked if they sold a DAB tuner! It has become popular here because of the many new stations that have been opened with niche music of all sorts.

 

[Sunnysky]

I used to have Definitive towers. Now we just use 8$ speakers from a recycling store . Yamaha small speakers on both ends of the couch back and a sub-woofer in the lower big drawer of a wall unit . This comes from a computer with wireless keyboard with volume control that also displays 1080p Video from OTA to a HDhomerun digital tuner or new movies+TV from KODI , PRIME or Stremio on Win7.

 

[TCSC47]

This string on speakers with its reference to a new house build gives me an in into one of my "almost famous" stories. I was lucky to do my electronics apprenticeship at a government research establishment here in the UK, The Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, where a lot of famous names worked in the 40's to 60's.

One of the famous names was Peter Baxandall - he of Baxandall tone control circuit and Leak Amplifier designs. One of my mates worked in his department and visited his home which he had had built to give the best possible acoustic properties. He had used one room as an infinite baffle cabinet with the speakers mounted in the wall, projecting into the adjacent listening room. To further the acoustic properties, none of the rooms had right angled corners but were all at different angles to avoid resonant standing waves!

So ChesterWoods, have you missed a trick in not talking to your architect at an early stage of your house design?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Baxandall
Memorandum of Baxandall -- https://www.aes.org/aeshc/jaes.obit/JAES_V44_9_PG796.pdf

 

[Audioguru]

In this age of people working from home to avoid getting the virus at work, TV news has experts talking from their homes that are frequently full of resonance and echoes. Of course the resonance and echoes are made much worse because they hid the microphone too far away from their mouth. I can guess how bad their home sounds systems sound like.