What Do You Get When You Spend More for Speakers? (2024)

A pair of speakers can cost as little as $30 and as much as $1 million. Through any of them, you can tell right away when you’re hearing Adele or Miles Davis or Nirvana. So what are the big spenders getting from their speakers that budget-minded shoppers are missing?

More-expensive speakers tend to incorporate improvements in design and materials that may make a big difference in the sound. Once you go from $30 to, say, $300 per pair, you should start to hear more of the details in the recording: the subtle taps of a drumstick on a cymbal, a guitarist’s fingers sliding along the fingerboard, or a singer sneaking in a breath to gain the power they need for their next note. The sound wraps around you more, creating what audiophiles call the soundstage—a sense of the ambience of a recording studio or a live concert venue. You also hear a fuller range of sound, including the deeper bass notes that give music its groove. Simply put, listening to good speakers feels more like hearing a band live—and less like hearing a recording of a band through a speaker.

However, there’s no guarantee that spending more gives you better sound. In fact, some very expensive audiophile-oriented speakers rely on outdated technologies and design philosophies that science has shown don’t sound good. Engineering a high-end speaker isn’t necessarily more costly than engineering a budget model—famed speaker designer Andrew Jones once told me that he found budget models more challenging to create—but the components and materials that go into a well-designed high-end speaker can make a huge difference in sound quality and ultimately in your enjoyment of your favorite music and movies.

Here’s what tends to differentiate a high-end speaker from a budget model—and what you should look for when you’ve decided to spend a little (or a lot) more. We’re focusing on traditional passive speakers here, but the same rules apply to active speakers with built-in amplifiers.

A more rigid enclosure

The speaker enclosure—the usually box-shaped structure that holds all the different parts of the speaker—plays a surprisingly large role in sound quality. If the speaker enclosure isn’t sturdy enough, it tends to vibrate in sympathy with certain frequencies of sound. This is called a resonance, and the effect is basically the equivalent of adding random notes to the music—as if a guitarist had just kept lightly plucking at their open A string no matter what tune the band was playing. Almost every speaker designer I’ve met considers enclosure resonance to be one of the biggest enemies of good sound.

The best speakers minimize resonances through the use of dense (and usually expensive) materials such as aluminum and Corian (typically used for countertops) or laminated panels of medium- or high-density fiberboard. They also have stiffer enclosures with more internal bracing; a cheap speaker may be empty but for the drivers and sound-absorbent stuffing, but a more-expensive model likely employs a complex internal bracing structure designed through extensive experimentation and laser interferometry vibration measurements. Many, such as the Monolith by Monoprice THX-265B, also incorporate curves to further stiffen the enclosure.

Fortunately, it’s easy to identify troublesome resonances by rapping a knuckle softly on the speaker walls. The best speakers emit only a light thunk, like what you hear when you tap your knuckle (lightly!) against a brick. The worst ring out with a full, resonant thunk. Rule of thumb: If you rap your knuckle against your speaker and your dog runs to the front door to see who’s there, consider upgrading.

Better speaker drivers

The drivers (the cones and domes on the front, and sometimes the sides and back, of the speaker), which actually produce the sounds you hear, can play a major role in the quality of the speaker. Inexpensive woofers (for low frequencies), tweeters (for high frequencies), and midrange drivers (for everything in between) often sound good, but typically they don’t play as loud as more-expensive drivers. And the bigger the driver, the more important its quality becomes: A cheap woofer likely can’t put out couch-shaking deep bass, but a well-made one of the same size might do so because it typically can move farther back and forth, thus moving more air.

The best woofers and midrange drivers have particularly stiff cones, often made from aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, wood-fiber pulp, or a sandwich of multiple materials. The stiffer the cone, the less likely it is to produce distortion—and the clearer the sound is. Tweeters can be made from metal, fabric, or plastic. There are innumerable great-sounding speakers with metal or fabric tweeters, but I’ve never heard a good one with a plastic tweeter. Many high-end speakers use a “ribbon” tweeter made from a thin film of mylar, aluminum, Kapton, or another material. When properly designed, these can produce exceptionally clear treble, which makes high-pitched acoustic instruments such as flutes, violins, and cymbals sound clearer and more detailed.

Only real speaker experts can tell much about a driver from looking at the front of it, and marketing statements are often misleading when it comes to driver materials. But if the manufacturer offers an in-depth explanation of the materials it uses in the drivers, that’s at least a sign that it put some serious evaluation into its choice.

More bass

Although you can find small speakers that cost as much as $10,000 per pair, more money usually means larger speakers with more bass. Most speaker lines start with small, more-affordable bookshelf models and gradually move up in size and price to larger enclosures that contain more and bigger woofers (and thus produce louder and deeper bass). More bass, by and large, is good: It makes music and movies more exciting and realistic, and it makes you feel more like dancing (or at least bobbing your head) when you play your favorite tunes.

Sometimes you can have too much bass, though—especially if the room you’re listening in is small or if you live in an apartment. Some of the better large tower speakers let you adjust the amount of bass by incorporating a separate amplifier with a volume control for the woofer. This is especially useful because you can set the bass just where you want it (or where the neighbors will tolerate it).

It’s important to remember that you can augment practically any speaker with a powered subwoofer to add more and deeper bass if you want it.

A decent crossover

The crossover is the circuit that splits the audio signal into bass for the woofer, treble for the tweeter, and midrange for the midrange driver (if one exists). It also allows the speaker designer to add extra electrical filters to make the speaker sound more even in the transition from bass to midrange to treble. Unfortunately, because the crossover is hidden inside the speaker (and few people would know what to make of a crossover even if they could see it), this tends to be the first place that speaker manufacturers compromise if they need to cut costs.

To meet the demands of their accounting departments without shoppers noticing, engineers sometimes simplify the crossover circuit, which makes it more likely that the speaker will start to “beam”—or spread sound in a narrow pattern—in the midrange frequencies. This effect can make a vocalist sound as if they had their hands cupped around their mouth. Reducing the number of parts in the crossover also can make the midrange sound uneven and coarse, as if the singer were just getting over the flu. Worst of all, the effect can push the tweeter past its limits, causing distortion and possibly shortening the tweeter’s lifespan.

Most speakers priced above a couple hundred dollars per pair have crossovers that are sophisticated enough to produce good sound, but once you drop to prices around $100 per pair, the crossover is highly likely to have just one or two components. That may be enough for you to get acceptable sound at low volume, but those aren’t speakers you’d want to hear loud, or for long. This is largely why low-budget speakers such as the Dayton Audio B652 (an iconic speaker that more or less pioneered the ultra-cheap speaker category) can sound pretty good but not great—and why audio enthusiasts often rebuild these speakers’ crossovers to improve the performance.

Although most manufacturers don’t publish the specifications for their speaker crossovers, some do. Understanding crossovers is arcane stuff, but for our purposes here, let’s just say that if the crossover uses at least second-order filters (12 dB per octave), that’s usually a good sign that it wasn’t sacrificed to hit a certain price.

More consistent manufacturing

Almost all speaker manufacturing is outsourced to overseas factories, and as documented in the book Poorly Made in China, quality control can vary greatly in those factories. Without good quality control, there’s more variability in performance from speaker to speaker, and the speakers you buy as a pair may not be well matched, which can make the stereo image seem to move around slightly between the two speakers.

The tighter the quality control, the more the factory has to charge because it’ll have a higher reject rate and more units that have to be repaired or discarded. Many audio companies hire their own quality-control people to work in the factory and monitor production; this, too, increases cost.

Contrary to popular belief, the quality of Asian manufacturing isn’t necessarily worse than that of North American or European manufacturing, and sometimes it’s better. The manufacturers of higher-cost, higher-quality speakers tend to gravitate toward the factories they know can deliver a consistently good product; when you pay more, you’re likely to get speakers that are closer in performance to the “golden sample” that the engineers originally created.

A nicer appearance

Almost all inexpensive speakers are wrapped in a vinyl covering rather than being finished with paint, stain, or varnish. Often, the vinyl covering is made to resemble woodgrain, and sometimes you have to look close to tell that it’s not real wood veneer. A well-made, vinyl-covered speaker can actually look better than a sloppily made speaker covered in wood veneer. However, in inexpensive speakers, thinner vinyl is often used, and it tends to be damaged easily. Sometimes the vinyl isn’t carefully applied, so it peels off. In both cases, the fiberboard underneath shows through, which looks really bad. We’ve seen this phenomenon in some of the models we’ve tested for our best budget subwoofer guide, but considering the extraordinary price-performance ratio in some of these subs, it’s hard to complain.

When you spend more than about $1,000 for a pair of speakers, you start to see the same sorts of improvements you see in furniture when you step up from, say, IKEA to luxury showrooms: real, book-matched wood veneers; gloss finishes with multiple coats of hand-rubbed lacquer; and even custom finishes in the same color as your favorite sports car. But nice veneers and finishes often cost extra, from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars per pair, and they don’t make a speaker sound any better. At lower prices, the money put into a finish is money taken away from the other parts of the speaker. Some high-end speakers that are often cited as a great value, such as those from Definitive Technology and GoldenEar Technology, have black fabric “socks” to conceal inexpensively finished fiberboard enclosures and instead have their money put into the drivers and crossovers.

Ultimately, you can’t judge a book—or a speaker—by its cover. Even a speaker that meets all the criteria described above can sound bad. All it takes is one little mistake by the designer or the factory. If you can’t listen to a speaker before you buy it, try to find reviews that include multiple listeners, blind testing, or measurements, all of which reduce the effects of the reviewer’s biases and are thus more likely to steer you toward speakers you’ll like. And never judge solely by the manufacturer’s website or by comments on internet forums. You could make a mistake that your ears—and wallet—will regret.

Sources

1. Vance Dickason, Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7th Edition, 2005
2. Brent Butterworth, Dispersion: A Show and Tell, Sound & Vision, November 28, 2011

Mentioned above

• For powerful, precise bass in stereo and home theater systems, the best subwoofer is the compact, affordable Rogersound Labs Speedwoofer 10S MKII.The Best Subwoofer