When a budget speaker is preferred to a high end one...

This is quite common in my experience.

Over the years and after having attended many Hi-Fi shows I’ve very rarely come away thinking that the most expensive speakers were ever the best on show.

The one exception was the Avantgarde Trios which imaged and scaled exceptionally.

At the same time I can’t ever recall the cheapest speakers ever sounding the best either, although last year someone was selling a pair of large bookshelves (in Baltic birch cabinets) which were rocking way out of their shockingly low price range (<£600).

They weren’t the best in show, that might have been the Kudos Titans (£17k), but it did illustrate the huge disconnect often seen between price and performance.

Just why this happens so often isn’t easy to explain but I have noticed that really expensive speakers usually tend to be more revealing in one area more than others and this often works against them.

The result can be that they not only reveal the faults in the recording they often end up highlighting issues within their own performance too.

Increased resolution can be a 2 way sword unless a careful sonic balance is not also maintained.

https://www.hifipig.com/mycetias-vulcanian-loudspeakers/

@m669326

To take an extreme case, a $200 speaker will very rarely sound better to the ttypical ears compared to a $2000 speaker. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but that’s my sense of things.

Mine too.

I generally agree about a calibration point but I do remember one occasion back in the 1990s when I auditioned quite a few speakers and none of them were doing it for me.

I was getting quite frustrated with the situation, the dealers and even myself (was this just me?).

I felt considerable sympathy towards the staff too. It wasn’t their fault that so many of the well reviewed designs of the day just sounded plain wrong to my ears.

As I was about to give up one of the sales staff suggested I give a listen to the bookshelf Rega Kytes (originals)... and suddenly - that was it!

Those small boxes produced a coherent sound that had no time anomalies and could communicate better than speakers costed which many times more.

I enjoyed those speakers for many years.

Eventually a friend introduced me to jazz, mainly Davis and Coltrane, and at that point I realised that the Kytes couldn’t do it full justice and began looking for speakers that could, as well as not losing the wonderful communication skills of the Rega’s.

Those Kytes cost £200 back then, so maybe they’d be around £400 today, but they sounded better to me than many much more expensive designs.

I’m fact, when it comes to the midrange, I’m not sure if I’ve heard anything much better since.

@emrofsemanon

Good point. Resolution can indeed be a double edged sword. Imagine watching a grainy scratchy black and white movie through the latest 4k TVs without it being remastered or upscaled.

You might be better off with something like 720p or even lower resolution.

I bet most young people today would have difficulty understanding how many of us were perfectly happy watching television on 19 inch black and white screens once upon a time.

As televisions got better - 405 to 625 lines and the introduction of colour, so did the recording side.

It had to.

@audition__audio 

I think Shaw is dead wrong about thin walled cabinets and energy dissipation. Sure the energy is removed but by the vibration of the cabinet which adds audible colorations. 

The entire thin-walled concept as devised by the BBC research department in the 1970s seeks to remove audible resonances from the all important midrange.

Harbeth claims that their lossy cabinets help to lower these resonances into the bass regions and below the threshold of hearing.

It is a particularly audacious claim given that so many others seek to do the opposite, namely increase stiffness and mass to their cabinets in order to attempt to physically suppress these resonances.

Yet it's also a claim that's never been refuted in almost half a century.

Can 2 diametrically opposed ways of trying to do the same thing both be right?

In  this case I would guess it depends upon whatever priority the designer deigns is the most important - the purest midrange or the hardest bass slam?

@analogj 

You reminded me of the time I was at a show where the same manufacturer was exhibiting 2 large floorstanding models.

The cheaper model was about £3k and it's bigger brother was nearer £10k.

The bigger speakers clearly had more weight, authority and scale but somehow something essential had been lost in translation.

The larger speaker just sounded monochrome in comparison - and for me, nothing else could compensate for that.

No amount of scale, power handling, image size can make up for a dilution of instrument timbre.

Nothing.

The cheaper model sounded like music and the larger one sounded like a demonstration.