Hello,
I would like to point out as well that there is no necessary correlation between speaker cost and perceived sound quality, especially when comparisons are carried out under controlled scientific conditions.
There's lots of inept speaker design in high-end circles (and at the low end as well). But, for illustration, there is a highly esteemed American speaker that sells for about $10,000 per pair that I've auditioned and it simply has no bass output below 35 Hz. Now for that kind of money, I expect transcendently clear midrange and highs, and bass down to subterranean levels! Apart from this speaker's severe bass liabilities, it also had aggressive highs.
During some of my double-blind listening sessions at the National Research Council (and I have the supporting data and listener comments in my files), a highly reputable and expensive British speaker was seriously downgraded for fat, tubby bass and a nasal sort of horn-loaded coloration on midrange material. The speaer was $6,500 per pair and was greatly exceeded in scores and sound quality by two Canadian designs selling for $1,000 (and less) per pair!
Certainly there are trade-offs in performance vs price at very competitive price levels, and above about the $2,000 mark improvements in performance, when they're audible, are usually marginal.
Incidentally, the British speaker's fat, "tubby" bass was a simple design problem. The large woofer was much too close to the floor (it was a floorstanding design and the proximity effects of the woofer/floor interaction produced and unnatural hump in the upper bass). Simply raising the speaker a foot or so above the floor cured the problem. The floorstanding speaker looked ridiculous at that point, with its castors dangling in free air, but its sound vastly improved, and so did its scores in the blind listening tests.
Alan Lofft
Axiom Resident Expert
