Selecting Speakers Should Be Easy
And it is, if you ignore most individual opinions and use science to manage the pool of candidates.
One of the most popular questions on internet related to home theater speakers is "What should I buy?" I presume people mean: "What speaker sounds best?" or, rather, more specifically, "What speaker will I like sound of, best, in my room, at my seating location?”
This seems like a great question to ask in public forum, where you could find some consensus about what other people like, to help guide your own audition and or purchasing decisions. But you will only get a handful of loud voices with strong opinions that may not be based on fair (or any) comparisons.
Years ago there were studies published by the Audio Engineering Society showing that most people in a double blind test prefer the sound of speakers with flat anechoic response and consistent off axis response.
So, while your tastes may not be like most people, odds are (literally) your preferences are similar to most people.
So, it makes sense to prioritize your listening and shopping based on what you are probably going to like more.
The web site spinorama.org has data about many many speakers. You can see how accurate (neutral, or flat) each one is, and how its dispersion looks. I would try the most flat measuring (accurate) speaker with the most consistent off axis response in your budget range, first, and then move on to others from there if you feel the need. (Note that your room may be influencing your experience.)
If the manufacturer and third party tests don’t tell you the response data of a particular speaker, I would prioritize it lower than the rest to audition.
The end.
Okay, you want to read more about this. Here we go:
We have demonstrations dating back to the 20th century (this paper from 1994 is an example) that show how a sighted listening test has more bias than utility.....and just about every opinion on this forum and every review you can google is based on a sighted biased listening test. That is exacerbated by marketing, confirmation bias, loss aversion, placebo effect, limited sample sizes, and so on. (Studies on these biases and fallacies stretch back more than 100 years.)
But the instinct to crowd source and seek consensus opinion about what most people like is reasonable. And there is a solution to remove a lot of bias.
FIRST QUESTION (quality of sound — accuracy)
So, to the question: Is there a way to figure out what speakers most people like the sound of? Yes, there is a scientific, reliable way to predict which speakers most people will like.
This does not mean that science alone can tell you what speaker to buy.
But science can tell you which speakers most people prefer. That data can help prioritize which speakers to consider and audition first. Why not start with the speakers that 4 out of 5 people prefer in a blind listening test? Odds are (literally) you will prefer them, too -- and there are quite a few to choose from.
SECOND QUESTION (quantity of sound — output)
But be sure to ALSO answer the question: What will work in my room? Some speakers play louder than others, so your seating distance can influence which speakers are appropriate for your theater. This is particularly important if you have multiple rows of seating.
I prefer to start the search by figuring out what output capability I need first (the second question listed above.) This is a quick way to eliminate inappropriate options (does a particular speaker fit in my budget and meet my output needs?) and narrow the list of what speakers to audition/consider.
Output Capability: Your room size and seating distance influence what speakers will work for you.
If output is not adequate, nothing else matters. So the first factors to consider are your budget and the distance you sit from the speakers. These present hard limits on what will be feasible.
Budget is self explanatory, and there are good speakers from a few hundred dollars on up. If you have a flexible budget, you can broaden your search and use other factors to make your list of candidates.
Output capability is the criterion used to make sure the speaker can play loud enough at your seating distance, without damage/distortion. The industry standard is called "reference level" for cinema. This is pretty loud. If you like the audio level in an IMAX theater, you like "reference level." There are lower and higher targets in the CEDIA guidelines (RP22) for home theaters. Personally, I find that anything that can hit 100db at my seating position is adequate for my needs. (Note that making the room quiet can greatly reduce the need to play the speakers extremely loud.)
CEDIA describes the math for how to take the specifications from the speaker manufacturer, your seating distance, and your AVR or amplifier power output, and figure out what SPL (sound pressure level, how loud) you can achieve at your seating distance:
There are online calculators to make this a little easier. Enter the seating distance, max power handling, and sensitivity for one speaker into this calculator: Peak SPL Calculator.
And, congratulations, you just narrowed the field of speakers to a set of options that meet both your price point and your output needs.
Sound Quality: What Speakers Am I Most Likely to Like
Speaker measurements and science cannot tell me what speakers to buy.
However, humans listening to speakers and agreeing about which sound better would be a useful data point to help me in my search. And science can help with that.
You can have thousands of people listen to the same few dozen speakers in the same room, all set up correctly, without any knowledge of which speaker was which, what it cost, what the brand name was, and so on. So called "double blind" listening tests in which even the person running the test doesn't know which speaker is which.
Then, if a consensus emerges from all those listening sessions regarding which speakers sound better than the other speakers, that might help focus auditions and listening sessions on those preferred speakers.
The good news? Experts have been running those kinds of listening tests for decades, and the results have been very consistent. The same speakers tend to be preferred by most people, both expert listeners and novices. So, you can look up the results of those tests and audition the speakers that won those listening tests. Since most people prefer those speakers, odds are good you too will prefer those speakers, so why not start your shopping there?
Of course, not every speaker has been tested that way. So can we make use of those tests to help us get a sense of which untested speaker might also be winners?
Could we measure the response of the speakers in a large number of ways, and see if the speakers people like all happen to share some particular measurable characteristics? That way, instead of onlyhaving a list of some specific speakers we have tested, we might also be able to predict whether other speakers, that we haven't had everyone listen to, might also be preferred by most listeners?
It turns out, we can measure the speakers people like, and then predict, based on measurements of other speakers, what most people are likely to prefer even if the new speaker wasn't in one of the listening tests!
(We can validate those predictions, by then conducting a test and seeing whether the predicted preference closely matches that actual preference of listeners. Spoiler alert: It tracks very very closely.)
What does that mean? That means we can accurately predict which speakers most people will prefer without even listening to them, most of the time, simply based on how those speakers measure.
That does not mean you should buy speakers just based on measurements. But it does mean you are likely to end up with speakers you more likely to like if you start your shopping with models that measure well (ie, similarly to the speakers that large groups of people prefer).
So, where do I find these measurements?
Well, the Consumer Electronics Organization created a specification years ago about how to conduct those tests called CEA 2034. More and more, serious speaker manufacturers are releasing this data. And there are several online publications that do these measurements on a wide variety of speakers. Audio Science Review, Erin's Audio Corner, and others publish their data — and there is a nice compendium of measurements from many sources, here: Spinorama dot org.
Amir over at Audio Science Review has some good videos about how to use these data, as does Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner (and his YouTube channel is the most prolific and detailed on this topic).
The TLDR summary of how to read this data? Given the same bass extension, the more linear (not flat, but something in a straight line) the SOUND POWER curve is, the more likely the speaker will be preferred by most listeners. (This line is a combination of factors like on and off axis response.)
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Appendix: There is a very rich and detailed history of how these experiments were conducted, what all the particular measurements can be used for when choosing speakers for theaters and when designing rooms. This post does not presume to be definitive. Rather, this post is a primer to help you make use of this science. Some additional comments to think about if you are so inclined.
1. Early in all this testing, it became apparent that people had an easier time differentiating between speakers if they heard them in mono -- a single speaker. Conversely, the more speakers that were added to a room, the less good humans were at differentiating among similar quality speakers. So sometimes what looks like a significant difference is actually much less significant in real life. That's good. There is less concern with making an error when there is more margin for similar results.
2. All the speakers tested (and predicted) were heard without any EQ being applied. But in most modern home cinemas, we are all using room EQ, bass EQ, and so on. How does that matter? It means that linear response is less important that consistent dispersion....because linearity can be improved through EQ as long as the off axis response (consistent dispersion) matches the on axis response. So if for budget, output, form factor, or another reason you need to cut corners, you can still get great results from speakers with consistent dispersion even if they aren't linear, since EQ can fix the latter as long as the former is already true
3. If you are worried getting speakers for music versus speakers for movies, don't worry too much. If you get speakers with good directivity and are willing to EQ them (which just every home theater system does) and you are going to use bass management (which just about every home theater system with subwoofer does) then good directivity is what you need. But if you are a music purist and won't use EQ and or won't use a subwoofer, then you have fewer options to choose from. More info: