Home Entertainment Speakers
What types of speakers are available and how should I choose between them?
Your choice of what kind of speakers you want really depends on what you listen to, how you like to listen to it, and where you like to listen to it. What that means, essentially, is that if you have a large space that you need to fill with a lot of audio, then you're going to want one type of system, versus a very small contained space such as a condominium or dorm room, you're going to want a different type of speaker system, and the variables are huge. There are a number of different ways of looking at speakers. First of all, let's start with indoor versus outdoor. A lot of folks like to listen to music outside - backyard, front yard. The biggest difference between an outdoor speaker and an indoor speaker is the fact that outdoor speakers tend to be weather-resistant. They tend to be resistant not only to water, but to pollution, to critters that like to crawl inside of them and take up nests, and as a result they tend to look a little more industrial, be camouflaged as outdoor foliage, a rock, or a tree in some cases - different types of things. Indoor speakers are designed to be used inside, so they don't have that kind of weather-proof application to them. Where we have clients that use indoor speakers for outdoor arrangements, you find that they fail in a matter of weeks, months - never longer than a couple of years. There is a tremendous amount of difference when you're talking about speakers in terms of individual speakers, speaker pairs, or speaker systems. What most stereo manufacturers recommend is that you match your speakers, which means that you pick speakers that were designed to work together with the amplifier that you are using to send audio to. So a matched speaker set is very important. Most important when you are matching speakers is what they call their impedence load. There are speakers out there that are designed to provide a resistance of four ohms. There are speakers out there that provide a resistance of eight ohms, or even more, sixteen ohms. If you end up matching the wrong speaker set with your amplifier, you could create a problem with your amplifier. Amplifier could shut down; your speakers could blow out. So it's very important that, regardless of whether you are looking at individual speakers or a speaker set or a pair or speakers, that they match the amplifier rating. There are a couple of manufacturers out there that offer wireless speakers, and while we think that at some point in the future they will be a very useful part of a home system setup, right now we don't install them. We don't recommend them. There's a lot of issues with wireless. The largest one right now has to do with the ability to receive audio correctly. Wireless speakers are very prone to being interrupted, either by someone walking in front of them, or you turn the microwave oven on, or you're doing something along those lines. So we don't install them. We don't recommend them for our clients.
What is "speaker wire" and what kind do I need?
Speaker wire is two strands of generally copper wire although sometimes it could be other exotic material that carry the signal from your amplifier to your speaker. You'll see them rated by their size and the larger, the lower the number the larger the cable. So if you see speaker wire that says AWG 1 that tends to be fatter speaker wire than on that says AWG 14 for example. Speaker wire size is very important when it's based on amount of power your sending to you speakers and how far away they are from your amplifier. So the little tiny strands of wire that come with your stereo when you buy and you open up the box and they've got these little tiny wires that your suppose to hook up to your speakers generally are too thin, thinner that you'd want to use on your speakers and you want to go out and get a speaker cable. Speaker wires is copper wire and there are a lot of manufacturers out there that spend a lot of money trying to convince you otherwise. The biggest issue with speaker wire is the fact that, or the biggest problem that we have with speaker wire is where they connect to the stereo or where they connect to the speakers and as long as the connections are done correctly you can uses lamp cord as speaker wire and get as good a signal as using a very expensive speaker cable from a manufacturing company. Speaker wire has the highest markup of any stereo component out there. So what a manufacturer produces for ten cents a foot may be sold at a retailer for 1 dollars a foot, and it is as a result it has huge marketing behind it and you can see that in any brand retailer out there.
