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Do You Buy Speakers Without Hearing Them?

In the 'good old days' there were a lot of hifi stores around so there was plenty of opportunity to go in and listen to various brands and models of speakers.  With the continuing disappearance of audio shops, I'm wondering if more people are making the leap to buy speakers they've never heard in person, or just limiting their purchase options to the brands they can hear locally?  If you are buying a speaker that you haven't heard, how do you get comfortable with that?  Magazine reviews?  YouTube demos?  

I've mostly heard any speaker I ended up buying, but in two cases I bought speakers that weren't available in my area.  I made my decision based on reviews.  In one case the speaker was really nice, but in the second case, the speaker was well-reviewed but ended up being disappointing.

Appreciate your thoughts.

 

Ag insider logo xs@2xazkeith

Showing 1 response by deep_333

deep_333
849 posts
 

It all comes down to IQ level of the engineer...

If it's a high IQ engineer behind the speakers, for example,

Andrew Jones 

Michael Borresen

Shinji Tarutani et al

Yoshiyuki Kaku

Greg Timbers

Peter Comeau

Masahiro Tobise

Akira Nakamura,

etc

you can buy it without hearing it...if these kinda guys were given a enough of a budget to work with it.

 

On the other hand, If a low IQ dude is designing your speakers...yeah, it's imperative that you hear it and decide if you wanna run away (as fast as you can) or not...In general, you can throw all kinds of cash on a low IQ engineer and he'll still come up with crap because cash never created aptitude/brain cells.

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