The technology of audio reproduction has undergone more change in the past 10 years than in the previous 100. Digitization, micro circuitry, new materials, and intensified attention to connectors and cables are among the prime movers in recreating sound of all kinds. The scope, power, and quality of these changes sometimes seem to have become available to us faster than our ability to figure out what to do with them. It’s exciting as hell, but it can also overwhelm our discernment when we invest in it. The array of technical options available can cause us to overlook the critical role – the defining role – of the most fundamentally unchanged components in anybody’s sound system.

Speakers are the last links in the sound chain (except for your ears), and because we hear in analog, speakers deliver sound to us in analog. Whatever your electronics do, when they finally send their signals to the speakers, the dice are cast. Your speakers will finish the job without any further opportunity for electronic modification. Sure, you can modify the sound according to what the speakers are telling you, but that’s a workaround; you can take it only so far. Poorly chosen or just plain crappy speakers will ultimately have their way, while good ones will reward every dollar and every second you’ve spent on the rest of your system.

Basic Considerations

So how do you decide what’s best for optimizing the sound of your electronics? The level of service and satisfaction the salesman can help you attain depends first upon how well you’ve prepared yourself, in terms of the considerations we’ll talk about here. As with speakers themselves, the initial considerations are subjective. They include:

• Purpose: What’s your main use for this system?
• Size: How big is your room, and from how far away are you usually listening?
• Power: How much suds do you need to drive these babies?
• Quality: It has no substitute.

There’s nothing here you haven’t had to deal with before – just a different context.

Purpose

Home theater may be all the rage, but music is what most of us listen to. Bear in mind that we experience music with ears forward: We’re attending to something that’s

right in front of us. On the other hand, more and more movies are made to surround us.

If you’re at a concert, the sound that comes from behind is the reflection of what’s in front, and since your home listening is done in a reflective room anyway, you may not need a surround speaker setup. In fact, a surround layout might really muddy what you’re hearing by mushing together the rear speaker output and the natural reflections of the room.

If you’re mainly into movies (particularly action flicks), no front-only speaker setup can originate a sound from behind you, let alone one that moves from back to front (think: Opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, or any Star Wars movie), so surround is a major bonus.

That said, it is a new Millennium, and the chance that there’s going to be reversion to simple stereo in any recorded medium is nil.

The recommendation here is that you devote primary attention to the front speakers. Any multichannel system should allow you to shut off the rear channels at your discretion, and in accordance with the recording mode of your source material. Thus, since your front speakers are going to comprise 95% of your sound experience 95% of the time, it only makes sense that you focus your quality and value attention there first.

Size & Power

It’s natural to think that getting enough volume out of your sound system is the key issue in speaker choice, but there’s another bun on the burger: Too much volume. Whether you have sensitive neighbors or not, if your amplifier and speakers combine to generate overpowering sound at top end, it can turn out that when you go for softer volume, you can’t turn it down far enough before the sound signal from you preamp section falls closer to the inherent noise level of your electronics and source material. Then what you hear at low volume is the sound of your entertainment source against an audible background of hiss. Boo.

There are two key considerations when matching your system and its environment. First is the match of the amplifier and the speakers, in both power (watts) and resistance (measured in ohms). Second is the output of that first match relative to the size of your listening room or theater.

Continue to page 2 >>

Page 1 2 Next »