bigshot
Headphoneus Supremus
I tried to get away with 2-3 grand in my living room. It would have been fine for TV, but not for music. You could probably do that if speaker size wasn't an issue and you were willing to buy used though. The hardest speaker to get cheap and good is the sub. You pretty much have to get one that costs more than $800 or $900 if you want it to sound decent with music. The cheaper ones are fine for bass rumble for movies, but they aren't flat and they sound really woofy. The center channel is really important too. I tried to cheap out there with a $150 Woot special and it just couldn't keep up with the volume from the mains. Dialogue in movies wasn't coming through over the music and if I boosted it to ride over the hump, it would flatten out. If you have money, it's always well spent on mains too. Rears are the ones that you can go cheap on, but not so much if you listen to a lot of multichannel music where the rears are just as active as the fronts. In that case, you need equally good speakers all around.
The biggest trick is volume in a good sized room. If you want to get it up to over 80dB, you need pretty darn good speakers to avoid distorting or flattening out, and you need a pretty powerful amp to push all those channels, especially with modern speakers that aren't terribly efficient. Cheap speakers can sound OK if you keep the volume down and you have a smaller space to fill, but finding really good loudspeakers for cheap is almost impossible unless you buy used stuff from the 70s. Price actually does have meaning with speakers. Cheap speakers are generally those little satellite jobs. It's impossible to get a reasonably flat response without huge frequency firebreaks in the sound. Bookshelves are better, but it's hard to fill a good sized space with them. Tower speakers are generally the best, but you're talking a lot more money when you have multiple drivers.
The biggest trick is volume in a good sized room. If you want to get it up to over 80dB, you need pretty darn good speakers to avoid distorting or flattening out, and you need a pretty powerful amp to push all those channels, especially with modern speakers that aren't terribly efficient. Cheap speakers can sound OK if you keep the volume down and you have a smaller space to fill, but finding really good loudspeakers for cheap is almost impossible unless you buy used stuff from the 70s. Price actually does have meaning with speakers. Cheap speakers are generally those little satellite jobs. It's impossible to get a reasonably flat response without huge frequency firebreaks in the sound. Bookshelves are better, but it's hard to fill a good sized space with them. Tower speakers are generally the best, but you're talking a lot more money when you have multiple drivers.
Last edited: