Cheap Speakers w/good electronics VS Good Speakers w/cheap electronics

Shadowfax

Shadowfax

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It's amazing what happens when you hook a cheap pair of speakers up to decent gear. It's also a problem for those who pick up a quality pair of speakers and try and drive them with gear that cannot show their full potential.

I am about to put a pair of Polk Monitor 30 Series II speakers up for sale and decided to give them a little listen in the main rig last night. I bought the Polks originally as Rears when I was beginning to piece together my HT setup.(replaced by Dynaudio 42s to round out a full Audience 5.1) They probably don't even have 50 hrs on them. I paid about $125 for them so they fit my definition of Cheap.

I first played some Special EFX - Modern Manners that is tasteful Smooth Jazz-fusiony material with lots of percussion. As expected, the Polks were a bit bright, but relayed all the subtle bells, cymbals, chimes nicely but still over the top a tad.

Second disk was Craig Chaquico - Acoustic Highway which is a glorious layering of acoustic Washburn guitar work by ex-Starship guitarist. This disk played nice because there is not much bass or congested tracks so it was pretty enjoyable.

The last disk I spun, and commented to my wife that "this disk should kill them" was a Stanley Clarke Fusion Band/disk called Virtu. It is heavy duty jazz fusion that tests any rig. To my surprise, the Polks held up pretty good but after 3 hours the highs were attracting all the neighborhood dogs :) so I ended my little experiment.

I also have a pair of Dynaudio 42s and my old JM lAbs Tantal 509s that perform all the way to potential when used as mains in a decent setup.

But on the flip side, and some of you guys can probably comment.... What happens when you hook up a pair of Magico, Radho, or other HE speakers to a HT receiver or sub $500 integrated? Probably as much surprise but in the other direction.
 
Brian - this is an interesting question. The Polk audios were never considered a "bad" speaker by any means. In the 80's, Polk made some nice speakers for the money. My findings have been that the electronics can only take a modest speaker so far. Conversely, when I put modest electronics on good speakers, I was surprised that they still sounded, well, good (but not great). An example was with my JOB225 and my Raidho D3's. It was a shockingly good match. I also tried my old Denon Receiver with my Strads and Alexia's and it was fine, not great, but fine.

Companies like Polk, DynAudio, JM Labs are truly good, solid engineering companies and rarely in their history did they make a bad product.
 
Brian,

I'm with you. I personally found again and again that "inexpensive" speakers can sound awesome with good gear.

I had the Pioneer speakers designed by Andrew Jones and more recently under $400 Klipsch bookshelf speakers hooked up to several of my amps and was blown away by how great they sounded.



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Recently I heard some really good speakers with some mediocre gear. The speakers were the new Paradigm S8's, with a run of the mill AVR, and they sounded astounding. I couldn't even imagine how great these would sound with some really good electronics behind them.
 
That white lab coat kept me from ever taking Mathew Polk too seriously. That, and he had to be in nearly every Polk ad ever printed. :S
 
What a fun question! Since I've traveled down this road a number of times, here's my take on this subject:

1) Even under these crazy circumstances, synergy matters.

2) As an overall whole, I tend to prefer the sound of a system that uses expensive electronics and affordable loudspeakers over a system that consists of car-priced loudspeakers that's fueled by mass-market priced electronics.
 
My vintage system has remained pretty much unchanged since I set it up, though I remember hearing the massive difference in my friend's system after he upgraded from his old Infinity Reference 60's driven by a Classe Cap-2100 integrated amp & Vimak dac, to Infinity Renaissance 90's. That was the only change at that time. Though we both agreed the Classe was struggling to drive the Rens, everything sounded much better; transparency, resolution, sound staging, imaging, bass depth/tightness etc. I thought that his Ref 60's were the weak link in his system, but wow what an amazing transformation!

I agree with other posters that synergy is still important, but assuming your upstream gear and cables are up to muster, for my money investing in better speakers gives the best bang for the buck.
 
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