more important? receiver or speakers?

[sharrell]

Which is more important? better speakers or better receiver? or are they mutually neccessary?

 

[Mr. Wolf]

It's kinda like the chicken or egg debate. Generally speaking, speakers are the most important part of any good audio system.

 

[wildfire99]

Speaker quality will be 70% of your audio performance, IMO. The remaining 25% is your source material, and the last 5% is your amp, receiver, processor, whatever, assuming it was built within the last 15 years.

As long as you have sufficient power, you almost always will be better served with better speakers rather than a new amp, processor, cabling, etc. I know that won't sit well with some people, but that's my experience. Some recordings, especially newer mass-market crap (e.g. whatever gets radio time these days) will sound bad no matter what.

 

[SippieCup]

Speaker quality will be 70% of your audio performance, IMO. The remaining 25% is your source material, and the last 5% is your amp, receiver, processor, whatever, assuming it was built within the last 15 years.

As long as you have sufficient power, you almost always will be better served with better speakers rather than a new amp, processor, cabling, etc. I know that won't sit well with some people, but that's my experience. Some recordings, especially newer mass-market crap (e.g. whatever gets radio time these days) will sound bad no matter what.

unless you find the unedited for loudness studio rips off the internet. then they sound pretty good ^^

 

[phide]

Unedited for loudness studio rips? What...?

wildfire's pretty much bang on here except for the fact that he did neglect one other very critical element of audio performance: the listening space. The typical cubic room can wreak absolute havoc as to what you actually hear at your listening position. Room design and treatment can influence sonic character more than most might think, and you'll find a lot of "audiofools" who surprisingly neglect this. Still, acoustic treatment is probably the lowest priority for most situations. The closer you are to your speakers, the less impact the room will have on the overall presentation.

But, yeah, I rank speakers much more highly on the audio food chain than I would the receiver. If you have a $1000 budget for speakers and a receiver, I'd likely spend about a third on the receiver. If the budget were $2000, I'd likely spend about 25% on the receiver, and so on and so forth.

 

[Pinipig523]

Speakers.

 

[spaceman]

Speakers yeah.

I have a $50 and $100 amp. Both do great.

Speakers were free but around $500 back in 1984. They were pretty good then and still are.

 

[ShagnWagn]

Great speakers will always sound great.

Receivers get outdated.

Spend most of the money on speakers.

As you get extra cash, buy quality amps to push the speakers. (amps don't get outdated)

Upgrade the receiver as you feel necessary to accommodate new technologies (connectors, like HDMI and such, and audio formats).

Only if your budget increases substantially will you need to replace the speakers (or just get an 'itch' to upgrade).

 

[Sycraft]

Speakers are always the place to spend the most money. This is simply because speakers have the biggest problem. They screw up the sound the most. To give you an idea, while amps generally talk about THD in terms of fractions of a percent (like 0.003% THD and so on) speakers talk about distortion in terms of percentage of just the second and third harmonics, and talk about at what level it will happen, which is always well below the max level.

As such, that's where the most money should go. Any reasonable amp is pretty good. Don't get me wrong, better amps can sound better, but it gets marginal. Even a good $300 receiver will have a pretty good amp in it that will do a pretty good job. If you moved from a $300 amp to a $1000 amp, I bet you'd be hard pressed to hear a lot of difference, especially if you have low quality speakers. You move from $300 to $1000 speakers, you can probably hear the difference even if you aren't in the same room.

I'd say if you are spending more than about 25% on the receiver that you do on the speakers, you are probably spending too much (I'm assuming 5.1 speakers). For sure don't go above 50%.

So if you get a $1500 speaker setup, a $300-400 receiver is probably good. Much past that, and I'd question if the money wasn't better spent on better speakers.

Now none of this is hard and fast, of course, as receivers do more than just act as an amp. If there's a receiver that has a particular feature you require (like, say, multiple HDMI inputs) then that's fine. Also, if you are getting a real cheap system, there is just a minimum you can spend on a decent receiver. However as a general guideline, spend a good bit more on speakers than on amp. All in all it should make you happier.

 

[illgiveumorality]

Speakers.

I went for an upper mid range receiver so I could have distance correction, but I think if I bothered to do the math it ends up only being about 25% of the total cost.

 

[sharrell]

this question which I thought could be debated, has now become a great solution to people with a budget! thank you to all!

On to a better question - what makes a receiver good?

 

[illgiveumorality]

this question which I thought could be debated, has now become a great solution to people with a budget! thank you to all!

On to a better question - what makes a receiver good?

A receiver or an amp?

Receivers nowadays are oriented towards compensation- with automatic parametric equalizers, time base correction, speaker distance and so on. The big deal now is HDMI, and waiting on some of the cheaper receivers to support dolby truehd/dts master and/or PCM. Onkyo is making some very good receivers at a good price point with all the new features.

Personally, I haven't encountered a situation where I've preferred my receiver to handle all of my input switching and upconverting etc. I'm also not that into DSP effects. I believe that in the end, it's still about sound quality.

 

[Nicolaskl]

Upconverting I'll give you, but I don't know why you wouldn't want to have your receiver handle input switching. I've got one cable running to my television, the way God intended.

 

[ShagnWagn]

I've got one cable running to my television, the way God intended.

Wow, would that be the power cable or the video cable?

Oh, if it's God, then it's just the video cable.

 

[illgiveumorality]

Upconverting I'll give you, but I don't know why you wouldn't want to have your receiver handle input switching. I've got one cable running to my television, the way God intended.

When you don't have cable, you're pressing buttons on all your appliances anyway.

 

[Garfing Sharks]

Sound quality will only be as good as the lowest quality component in the signal chain will allow.


That being said switching from a pair of Sennheiser HD497's to beyerdynamic DT880's on my laptop did not make near as much of a difference as switching from my laptop to my desktop with X-FI extrememusic with my DT880's, or adding an amp between my laptop and DT880's. Speakers made the least difference.

 

[Arainach]

Upconverting I'll give you, but I don't know why you wouldn't want to have your receiver handle input switching. I've got one cable running to my television, the way God intended.

Because every link you put in the middle degrades the signal a little bit more. Not guaranteed to be a noticable degradation, but it's there, and in the case of a lot of consumer receivers, it is there.

 

[Syndicated_Death]

I would rate them about 50/50. reason being if you don't have a receiver that has enough power to properly drive those speakers then you will damage them and produce a lot of distortion at higher volume levels.

Now if you go with a speaker solution like Meridian where the speakers have their own amps and a digital input they can be used by them selves. However that might be beyond your budget.

 

[Nicolaskl]

Because every link you put in the middle degrades the signal a little bit more. Not guaranteed to be a noticable degradation, but it's there, and in the case of a lot of consumer receivers, it is there.

With digital signals and a decent quality receiver I don't think it IS there, and even if it is there it isn't perceivable.

 

[echn111]

Well if you've got a high resolution sound source and a receiver that can't handle it, then it really doesn't matter how good your speakers are.

In a case like this, good speakers with a good receiver can outperform excellent speakers with an average receiver.

So pairing up your $10k speakers with a $100 receiver is a bad idea.

(ok, if you're listening to mp3s, then this doesn't apply)

 

[Nicolaskl]

So pairing up your $10k speakers with a $100 receiver is a bad idea.

Sure it is, but it's a MUCH, MUCH better idea than pairing up 10k in electronics with 100 dollar speakers. You could have the greatest electronics in the world and if you're running them through some Logitech X-540s it's still going to sound like crap.

Running some 10k dollar speakers off a hundred dollar receiver will still sound very good though. I hooked up my Infinitys to an Insignia 2 channel receiver that I bought for my gf for 88 dollars and they still sound amazing.

 

[echn111]

Both extremes are bad.

As I said, good speakers with a good receiver can outperform excellent speakers with an average receivers (as per the example where the source was high definition). And as per your example, in many cases, the same applies for average speakers with an excellent receiver.

And yes, while I agree that speakers are the most important, you don't want to make the receiver the weakest link.

 

[Nicolaskl]

As I said, good speakers with a good receiver can outperform excellent speakers with an average receivers

I think that's debatable and has to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Good speakers and cheap electronics outperforming cheap speakers and good electronics isn't, it's a universal truth.

 

[echn111]

I think that's debatable and has to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Good speakers and cheap electronics outperforming cheap speakers and good electronics isn't, it's a universal truth.

You're thinking too much in terms of abolutes. Re-read what I said. You'll notice the terms "can" "in many cases" etc.

Anyway, if you really want to think in terms of absolutes, without cables, there is no sound. Hence it is a universal truth that a cheap system with cables will outperform excellent speakers without....

Enough of this. You may find we're saying similar things.

 

[Nicolaskl]

You may find we're saying similar things.

I'm not so sure. I think ~9 grand in speakers with ~1 grand in electronics will blow away ~5 grand in speakers and ~5 grand in electronics pretty much every time, and you seem to be saying the opposite.

 

[Arainach]

Sound quality will only be as good as the lowest quality component in the signal chain will allow.


That being said switching from a pair of Sennheiser HD497's to beyerdynamic DT880's on my laptop did not make near as much of a difference as switching from my laptop to my desktop with X-FI extrememusic with my DT880's, or adding an amp between my laptop and DT880's. Speakers made the least difference.

That's because high-impedance headphones, especially the Beyers, are incredibly sensitive to amplification or lack thereof, and your laptop didn't have the power to put out. Most speakers aren't nearly as picky. As long as you get into a decent mid-range receiver ($300+, decent brand like Yamaha, Denon, Rotel, whatever) that's rated close to the speakers' power, it won't be a night and day difference. So long as you stay within solid state amps, I've auditioned $300 vs. $3000 amps connected to $400 to $4000 speakers. The $300 amp with the $4000 speakers was at least 90% of the $3000 amp and $4000 speakers and was miles ahead of the $3000 amp and $400 speakers. Spend your money on speakers first.

 

[Garfing Sharks]

That's because high-impedance headphones, especially the Beyers, are incredibly sensitive to amplification or lack thereof, and your laptop didn't have the power to put out. Most speakers aren't nearly as picky. As long as you get into a decent mid-range receiver ($300+, decent brand like Yamaha, Denon, Rotel, whatever) that's rated close to the speakers' power, it won't be a night and day difference. So long as you stay within solid state amps.

Most speakers aren't as picky as the beyer's? Senn's are MUCH more picky. Most high end headphones require an amp to sound their best (HD650, K701, DT880/990, Proline 2500, RS1). My HD497's were no different.

I've auditioned $300 vs. $3000 amps connected to $400 to $4000 speakers. The $300 amp with the $4000 speakers was at least 90% of the $3000 amp and $4000 speakers and was miles ahead of the $3000 amp and $400 speakers. Spend your money on speakers first.

You're thinking out of my price range (and what most others are willing to spend). The move from a $50 pair of headphones to a $300 pair ($250 price difference) did not yeild near the difference as did moving from on-board sound to a decent sound card ($50 addition), or adding an amp ($50 CMoy) to my signal chain did.

All I'm saying is two things:

1) You feed either an okay or excellent speaker crap, it's going to output crap.

2) An under driven excellent speaker will sound worse than a properly driven okay speaker. This HAS to come into factor when you upgrade your signal chain.....if you're going to buy quality speakers, you better have or be buying an amp with your purchase.


We're practially saying the same thing in a different way. What it comes down to is this:

Speakers cost more money to hear and increase in performance than amps and sources do.

Where my opinion deviates though, is that sources and amps are more important to the overall signal quality. Speakers are designed to be transparent with a flat frequency response, and their job is to reproduce as faithfully as possible what the source and amp feed it. If the source isn't doing an efficient and clean job of converting the music into electrical signals the speakers can use, the speakers are just going to spit that out.

 

[Arainach]

Most speakers aren't as picky as the beyer's? Senn's are MUCH more picky. Most high end headphones require an amp to sound their best (HD650, K701, DT880/990, Proline 2500, RS1). My HD497's were no different.

Speakers. SPEAK-ERS. Not headphones.

You're thinking out of my price range (and what most others are willing to spend). The move from a $50 pair of headphones to a $300 pair ($250 price difference) did not yeild near the difference as did moving from on-board sound to a decent sound card ($50 addition), or adding an amp ($50 CMoy) to my signal chain did.

All I'm saying is two things:

1) You feed either an okay or excellent speaker crap, it's going to output crap.

2) An under driven excellent speaker will sound worse than a properly driven okay speaker. This HAS to come into factor when you upgrade your signal chain.....if you're going to buy quality speakers, you better have or be buying an amp with your purchase.

He's not talking about no amp at all, and he's not talking about your budget. The point is that as long as you get an OK receiver, you'll see more for your money at a much faster rate from investing in speakers than from investing in the receiver.

Speakers are designed to be transparent with a flat frequency response, and their job is to reproduce as faithfully as possible what the source and amp feed it. If the source isn't doing an efficient and clean job of converting the music into electrical signals the speakers can use, the speakers are just going to spit that out.

That's actually more of an opinion than a fact. The point of speakers is to sound good, not necessarily sound flat.

 

[Sycraft]

Speakers may be designed to try and have a flat frequency response, but very, very few come close to that. A FR graph of a typical speaker will surprise you. A phase graph will make you faint. Speakers just aren't very good at doing what they are supposed to do. This isn't the fault of speaker makers, it is just extremely hard (and thus extremely expensive) to make them well.

As an example, take the B&W 683. This is a pretty high end speaker by most standards, costing about $1500 for a pair. That's way beyond most budgets. So, perfectly flat right? Not even close. The rated FR is 38Hz - 22kHz +-3dB. That means a total of 6dB of variation within that range. Below 38Hz, it starts rolling off quite hard, and it doesn't go all the way down to 20Hz.

How about distortion? Surely it is an ultra low THD! Er.... No. At 90dB the 2nd and 3rd harmonics are about 1% distortion over the whole frequency range, and about 0.5% if limited to 120Hz - 20kHz. The distortion then rises as the volume does. As for phase change, well they don't even list it. B&W is better than most in that department, but it'd still scare you.

Now, compare that to an amp. Take a Samson Servo 120a. That comes in at just a little over 10% the price of the speakers. From 10Hz - 20kHz it is -0.5dB, meaning if you reference the highest point in the curve, it drops not more than 0.5dB anywhere in the range (and then only at the extremes). THD (+noise) is only 0.01% and in fact only reaches that in the high frequencies (20kHz-30kHz). Through most of the audio range, distortion is well below that. They also don't list phase change, however it is very minor, basically only from the DC blocking capacitor.

So an amp costing less than $200 does a much, MUCH better job at getting a flat, complete, frequency response than speakers costing over $1000.

As I said, this is no big surprise. It is difficult and expensive to make speakers that are close to flat. Amps are not nearly such a problem.

So my recommendation stands: Spending money on speakers is more worth it than an amp. I'm not saying don't ever spend more on an amp, just don't spend too much. If you have $2000 speakers, sure, get a $500 amp. However if you have $500 speakers, you'd be better off getting a cheaper amp, and better speakers.

 

[Nicolaskl]

1) You feed either an okay or excellent speaker crap, it's going to output crap.

A hundred dollar CD player and a 300 dollar receiver isn't going to sound like crap. Even a 40 dollar CD player and a hundred dollar receiver isn't going to. Arainachs numbers are dead on. You'll get 90% of the quality by spending 10% of the dough when you're talking solid state electronics. Not so with speakers.

2) An under driven excellent speaker will sound worse than a properly driven okay speaker. This HAS to come into factor when you upgrade your signal chain.....if you're going to buy quality speakers, you better have or be buying an amp with your purchase.

Well, of course you need amplification, you can't run speakers straight off your cable box. And it's pretty hard to under drive speakers these days, most listening is done at less than a watt. That leaves a lot of headroom even with an inexpensive 60 wpc receiver.

 

[Garfing Sharks]

Speakers. SPEAK-ERS. Not headphones

I'm confused, are headphones not an application of a SPEAK-ERS (Whats with the hyphen anyway)? How have I been getting all this musical goodness through these things on my head? Magic?

A hundred dollar CD player and a 300 dollar receiver isn't going to sound like crap. Even a 40 dollar CD player and a hundred dollar receiver isn't going to. Arainachs numbers are dead on. You'll get 90% of the quality by spending 10% of the dough when you're talking solid state electronics. Not so with speakers.

Irrelavant. Did you even read what I wrote?

1) You feed either an okay or excellent speaker crap, it's going to output crap.

There is no mention of price anywhere in that statement. All I said was "you feed speakers crap, they're going to faithfully reproduce crap", which is very true.

I'll state it again:

Speakers cost more money to hear and increase in performance than amps and sources do.

I don't see how we're not at an agreement with this? End of thread.

Well, of course you need amplification, you can't run speakers straight off your cable box. And it's pretty hard to under drive speakers these days, most listening is done at less than a watt. That leaves a lot of headroom even with an inexpensive 60 wpc receiver.

It's quite easy actually, just stick anything about 40-50 Ohms or above on a PC output and you're in under driven heaven.

 

[Nicolaskl]

Who makes 40 or 50 ohm speakers? Speakers, not headphones. I don't give a shit about headphones, no one here is talking about headphones (except you), this thread is not about headphones. You want to talk about irrelevant?

There is no mention of price anywhere in that statement. All I said was "you feed speakers crap, they're going to faithfully reproduce crap", which is very true.

I'll state it again:

This thread is about electronics versus speakers and where to spend your dough, if your reference to crap isn't a reference to cheap electronics then your statement is basically off topic and useless. Forgive me for assuming your statement was actually referencing the subject matter of the thread, next time I read one of your posts I'll assume you're blathering on about something unrelated, like you're doing here.

Yes, if you hook great speakers up to a 20 year old 5 dollar chinese made CD player running through 50' oxidized interconnects, what you get out will probably sound like crap. Congratulations on your brilliant insight.

The point is it's pretty hard to get electronics that are utter crap. It is VERY easy to get speakers that are utter crap.

 

[Garfing Sharks]

Hahaha Glad we can have a conversation without blowing our heads off with anger. Again, headphones are an application of speakers. Just like monitors are another application of speakers. They both use speakers

This thread is about cheap electronics versus cheap speakers

No, it isn't. Read the OP's post. It doesn't have anything to do with money.

 

[Garfing Sharks]

Muwahahaha, quoted before you could edit!

 

[Sycraft]

I think he's right to get a little frustrated with you since you really aren't listening. Headphones have little to do with speakers. I realise they are operating off of the same dynamic principal, but that is where the similarities end. One major difference that has been noted is impedance. Speakers are universally quite low impedance. 8 ohms nominal is far and away the most common for home speaker systems. Of the remaining fraction, 4 ohm makes up most of it. Anything lower or higher than that is very uncommon.

Thus speaker amps don't have to worry about a wide range of impedances. You'll find most home amps won't take a load less than 4 ohms, and their rated power is listed at 8. They really don't have to worry about speakers falling outside of that.

Headphones are a whole different deal. They range from very low, nearly as low as speakers, to rather high, at high as 600 in some cases. Thus it is much harder to design an amp, at least a cheap one, that will work in all cases. High impedance phones are driven more by voltage, lower impedance phones are drive more by current.

Headphones are also much smaller signal. Pump a watt in to most speakers and you get somewhere in the 85-95dB range out. Pump a milliwatt in to most headphones and you'll get north of 90dB, even over 110dB in some cases. You encounter some very different design problems when operating on those different scales.

 

[Nicolaskl]

Hahaha Glad we can have a conversation without blowing our heads off with anger. Again, headphones are an application of speakers. Just like monitors are another application of speakers. They both use speakers



No, it isn't. Read the OP's post. It doesn't have anything to do with money.

Get real, of course it does. If money isn't an object then it doesn't matter which is more important, spend a fortune on both. Your assertion that the thread doesn't have anything to do with money is ridiculous. There are obviously value considerations as well but when you're talking about "better" speakers and "better" electronics you're essentially talking about more money versus less. If you want to pretend otherwise in order to be intentionally obtuse or to try and foster a useless argument then by all means, go ahead, but you wont get any participation from me.

 

[Garfing Sharks]

I think he's right to get a little frustrated with you since you really aren't listening.

Fair enough, I will refrain from further conversation. In all honesty I'm probably getting as frustrated with him as he is with me.


If you don't want to respect my opinion, I can't stop you. I just think that since that OP asked for speakers vs sources, that all speakers were fair game regardless of whether they're in an ear cup or cabinet and how different of a design they are.

In my opinion, better sources please my ear more than better speakers do. That's all I have to say. I apologize for the commotion, Nicolaskl.

 

[Nicolaskl]

In my opinion, better sources please my ear more than better speakers do.

What speakers and sources are you talking about? So far all you've referenced is headphones and a laptop. If you're talking about headphones, say headphones. If you're actually talking about speakers then which ones and what sources? Just because they both use drivers doesn't mean that experience with one automatically applies to the other, as has been demonstrated.

And from what you've said your experience with amplification (besides being almost entirely irrelevant to speakers) doesn't really seem like it's a question of "better," its a question of "appropriate." If I'm trying to drive a 12" subwoofer in my HT with a 10,000 dollar 5 watt tube amp, it'll sound a lot better if I switch to a cheap 500 watt solid state amp. In this case it wasn't that I went from poor electronics to better electronics, it's that I went from inappropriate electronics to appropriate electronics.

 

[football76]

Speakers. That is all you need to know.

If you need to ask that question, you'll want to spend ~60-70% on speakers and 30-40% on electronics. Done.

I recommend introducing yourself at soundandvisionmag.com forums and asking for "IG" he is the most "sound" educated person I have ever witnessed.

 

[thebeephaha]

I'd say speakers first but don't skimp on the amp.

I went from a Pioneer VSX-D711 medium end consumer 5.1 receiver to a "high end" Pioneer Elite VSX-54TX and HOLY CRAP. It was like night and day, much less distortion at higher volumes followed by a overall warmer tone. Of course some would say this is mainly in my head than anything else but to me it made the difference I wanted.

Now ask me about cables and I will say this, if a cord costs more than any one of your speakers or amp or other component, you need to get your brain checked, 99.9999999% pure oxygen free liquid silver BS cords to the normal human will sound no different than your run of the mill budget pure copper speaker wire etc.... [/rant]