Speaker Buying Tips

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.

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.

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

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.

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?