Speaker Buying Tips

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Designing Your System
Steve Faber  |  Aug 31, 2007  | 
Choosing components that work for you.
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Audio Separates Buying TipsAV Receiver Buying TipsAV Receiver SetupAV Receiver TechSpeaker Buying TipsSpeaker SetupSpeaker Tech
How to Choose a Home Theater for Movies or Music
Steve Guttenberg  |  Aug 25, 2011  | 
Selecting audio components is one of the more daunting tasks that any serious home theater enthusiast faces. On the surface, it seems evident that if you just go out and buy the best components you can afford, they’ll sound great with both movies and music. And that’s generally true: A better system will more accurately reproduce the waveforms you feed it, irrespective of whether they come from a movie or music. But it’s often not that simple. While assembling a home theater system that’s equally spectacular with movies and music may be a laudable goal, unless you have unlimited funds, you’ll probably have compromises to make. At that point, you might want to steer the system’s performance strengths one way or the other with the right mix of speakers and electronics. But how do you go about matching these up?
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Speaker Buying Tips
How to Shop for a Surround Sound Speaker System
Adrienne Maxwell  |  Oct 29, 2005  | 
Audio myth #1: You have to be a hardcore audiophile to hear and appreciate the way a good speaker system can complete your home entertainment experience.
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Speaker Buying TipsSpeaker SetupSpeaker Tech
HT Guide to Speakers
Mark Fleischmann  |  Mar 17, 2011  | 
Home theater has transformed loudspeakers in nearly the same way it transformed TV. As screens have gotten bigger, the stereo soundstage has expanded into a surround soundfield. Wall-mounted HDTVs can now mate with in-wall, on-wall, or soundbar speakers. Even the higher performance of HDTV finds an analog in lossless surround for movies and music.
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Speaker Buying TipsSpeaker Tech
Just the Facts: Speaker Shopping & Tech Tips
Rob Sabin  |  Oct 25, 2012  | 
Looking for that perfect set of speakers? Before you hit the stores, here’s everything you need to know in a quick-read format. See our Top Picks for Floorstanding and Compact Speakers and Subwoofers.

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Speaker Buying Tips
Sound Choices: How to Pick the Best Speakers for You
Daniel Kumin  |  Aug 13, 2012  | 

Virtually all music recordings and film soundtracks are intended by their creators to be heard over speakers. There’s good reason for that: Speakers yield the most natural tone and the most accurate spatial presentation — qualities that are difficult or impossible to match via any sort of headphone listening. But what kind of speakers should you buy?

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Speaker Buying TipsThe Connected Life
Soundbars: Are They Sonic Solutions?
John Sciacca  |  Oct 29, 2013  | 
Perusing your favorite AV site (it’s this one, right?!), browsing real or virtual aisles of an electronics store, or surfing the Web, you’ve undoubtedly run across multiple companies offering to improve your audio by adding a soundbar. With models ranging from sub $100 to over $2,000, it’s a category that has exploded practically overnight.

In a way, soundbars can be likened to nuclear power; used correctly, they can improve your life, but misused can kill everyone in the world several times over. (I don’t have all the science needed to back that up, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.)

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Speaker Buying Tips
Speaker Shopping Tips
Thomas J. Norton  |  Aug 10, 2007  | 
Loudspeakers may not be the hardest things in the world to shop for (cars win by a landslide), but the search hasn't gotten any easier in the past few years, as the decline in dealers offering serious demonstration facilities (particularly the big-box, warehouse stores) has reduced the opportunities for an ears-on audition.
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Soundbar ReviewsSpeaker Buying TipsAudio Video News
The 10 Best Soundbars to Buy Right Now
Rob Sabin  |  Dec 11, 2014  | 
Home theater enthusiasts know that when it comes to performance there is no real substitute for an AV receiver connected to discrete speakers spread around the room. But soundbars, those popular standalone TV speaker systems, have been getting better and better with each passing year, and some very respectable options have been turning up in the premium category. Here’s our current list of the best you can buy, with recommendations under $500, from $500 to $1,000, and above $1,000. For the full review (where available), click on the title of each product. —Rob Sabin
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Subwoofer ReviewsSpeaker Buying TipsAudio Video News
The 10 Best Subwoofers to Buy Right Now
Bob Ankosko  |  Dec 19, 2014  | 
At Sound & Vision, we’re constantly looking for subwoofers that outperform the competition and rise to the top of their price class. Here’s our list of the best subwoofers you can buy with recommendations in three price categories: less than $1,000, $1,000 to $4,000, and $5,000 and up.
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Speaker Buying Tips
The Art of Listening: Your Guide to Evaluating Speakers
Daniel Kumin  |  Aug 19, 2016  | 
Space is tight and time is short, so let’s dispense with the preliminaries. This is a guide to evaluating loudspeakers—how I do it, anyway. You’ll find as many methodologies as you will listeners, but most experienced “experts” fall in along similar lines.
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Speaker Buying TipsSpeaker TechAudio Video News
The Ultimate Guide to Smart Speakers
Michael Antonoff  |  May 27, 2018  |  First Published: May 24, 2018  | 
The smart speaker is about to change the way you live. Are you ready?

It’s not every day that a new consumer electronics category comes along that has an adoption rate projected to be faster than that of any other device, including smartphones, computers, TVs, and radios.

Some 56.3 million smart speakers are projected to ship this year, nearly twice as many as last year and 10 times the number shipped in 2016, according to Canalys. In the first quarter of 2017, only 7 percent of U.S. households had smart speakers. By the end of 2020, 75 percent are expected to have them, according to Gartner and Edison Research.

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Speaker Buying TipsSpeaker SetupSpeaker TechHome Movie Theaters
The Ultimate Test: Dolby Atmos vs. Dolby Atmos
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Aug 06, 2015  | 
Dolby Atmos, for you members of the unwashed and uninformed masses (yeah, you know who you are), enables film sound designers to treat individual sonic elements as virtual “objects” that can be placed and moved almost anywhere within the three-dimensional space of a movie theater. Two things are important about its adaptation for home theater. First, the soundfield—in its original, discretely encoded version, not an extrapolated one—is no longer limited to a two-dimensional plane circling around your ears.
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Tower Speaker ReviewsSpeaker Buying Tips
Top 10 Tower Speakers: $3,000 or Less
Rob Sabin  |  May 08, 2015  | 
Ready for a nice, new set of gleaming tower speakers? Here’s our Top 10 list of models costing between $1,400 and $3,000 a pair, complete with rationales for why each model made the cut.
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