My advice to anyone looking to get started is to just buy the most expensive speakers you can afford (used market is good for this), pickup an older amp for peanuts on eBay that can power said speakers, and some bargain bin cables from RadioShack.
I'm actually in the market for a new pair of speakers, and the only objective advice I've seen is spending more gets you better speakers. While it must be true in some sense, price as an indicator of quality seems like a terrible idea because it's so easily gamed through marketing.
The landscape of local competition seems quite limited (Best Buy seems to dominate everything with B&W and ML), so it feels there's no way of knowing if they're actually worth those prices, or if it's just Best Buy's standard sucker pricing. Going up into that price range I also know there is a whole host of speaker manufacturers that are of course impossible to find locally (not that intense listening room tests are super enjoyable for long periods of time either). And going up in price also makes the price of "screwing up" that much larger.
So I've given up on that idea and figure I'll simply start with a Fry's special and see if I find them objectionable in any way. I'm not looking to make this a hobby, and higher end just seems so damn intractable otherwise.
I've already got the speaker cables from RadioShack (not much time left to obtain them)! Let's hope your exact advice canonizes and I can sell them for Monster cable prices in several years...
How will you be using your speakers and what's your price range?
If you really don't know where to start, I could probably suggest something.
I've gotten great recommendations from Don Lindich. I tipped him $20 via PayPal some years back because of all his great advice.
He is/was a newpaper columnist and has some Internet presence. He is honest, and focused on value for money, and has personally tried and reviewed thousands of products.
Better speakers do cost more -- there is fundamental physics there, which is NOT the case for amplifiers or cables. But still, you will find easily 5x variation in price for roughly equal "quality". So even though you should spend most of your money on speakers, it's NOT the case that simply spending more gets you better quality.
Price range is undecided. The original plan was something simple off craigslist, but then I found myself looking at new stuff and thinking the $2k/pr B&W at Best Buy sounded pretty damn good, and wanting to hear more of the gamut between.
Use is music (electronic, rock, classical), mainly casual while doing other stuff. Some possible interest in home theatre down the line, but not immediately and not looking to make tradeoffs for it either (eg I want non-satellite full-response speakers, as I'm not a big fan of the dual-humped "subwoofer sound", at least outside of a car).
What specific fundamental physics are you talking about?
How do people generally shop for these things if they aren't available to listen to locally?
I try to be a little aware of speakers in friend's houses and stores to see what things sound like, but I don't purposely audition them. Although very few of my friends have decent speakers.
It sounds like you know a bit about what you want. My use case is also music. I used to have a surround setup, and it just wasn't worth it. And I agree with you on the subwoofer thing -- I had one and addition to the physical downsides, it felt unbalanced.
In my case I realized I like the imaging of Bose speakers, but they are cheaply made and seem a bit scammy and overpriced. Bose isn't worthless -- they do sound DIFFERENT, on purpose -- but they are flawed. There is real engineering there.
I asked Don Lindich about small speakers with good imaging that are not Bose, and he recommended Mirage Omnisats. It basically gives you a spacious sound like Bose, but they are higher quality in other respects, and I think cheaper.
I used to have Mirage Omnisats with a sub. Now I have Ohm Walsh 1000's:
Admittedly this was a blind Internet buy, but they have a long (90 day) return policy, and I trusted Don's recommendation.
They sound fantastic, and people who have come to my apartment love them, and start spontaneously dancing when they hear them. Relatively speaking, they're not super expensive, but most people haven't heard speakers this good in a living room.
I also appreciate a small company that has been around for decades doing the SAME thing -- really refining it. They believe in what they're doing. You can't derive a speaker design from first principles, so you need to have a long history, with lots of trial and error.
Perhaps this doesn't really answer your question, but that's how I got to a set I'm very happy with.
As for the physical aspects, good speakers require fickle and custom manufacturing techniques. And, all things being equal, bigger speakers sound better, and bigger usually means more expensive.
Amplifiers and cables are mostly made of commodity parts as far as I can tell. There is also just more of a potential variance in quality of design with speakers, so I think they require more expertise to design than amplifiers. Bad speakers are really bad, but it's hard to buy an amp that's unlistenable.
So I guess if like me you are short on friends who like quality audio, I would visit stores, ask like-minded people on the Internet, and then make liberal use of return policies. There is also just a bunch of trial and error, and there's a reason why audiophiles tend to own many pairs of speakers that they don't need :)
I appreciate the pointer. Reading their website, they sound great. But a sales process where you're half committing without hearing many different competing products is so foreign to me. I'm the kind of person that wants to experience the many different "flavors" of something before I can make a decision. Clearly they would not like it if I were to buy a pair with the intent of definitely returning them before 60 days - hence why they try and work with you to make the sale. If I had to work with that system, I guess the way to do it would be to concurrently order from a few different manufacturers so that I could at least keep the pair I preferred, but that still seems abusive. Maybe I just need to do more Internet research, and then get over it?
Those cables tend to be really shitty. Especially cheap RCA cables are prone to intermittent contacts, after having been plugged/unplugged a few times.
Get decent cables from a reputable source, such as...
...which are worth the money, compared to the overpriced junk normally sold in consumer outlets :-(.
[I do PA sound for a local non-profit part of the time, and bad cables are a constant annoyance, not because of sound quality, but for stability, good contact, flexibility...]
