Choosing speakers for home music setup

[Josh Cotton]

I want to buy speakers for my home desk for high-quality sound and music production. I currently have the Creative Pebble speakers, which aren’t great. I don’t have a very high budget, and am currently looking on Facebook Marketplace for good studio monitors/ speakers around the £30-£40 mark. What is a good recommendation? Also, is Wattage a massive issue?

[saintlouisbagels]

Bruh you’re seriously trying to upgrade from $20 speakers to $30-$40 speakers

 

Wattage doesn't matter because normal listening scenarios would never approach maximum wattage ratings - that is only important if you're trying to throw a house party and you're turning the volume to max.

Plus every speaker is different and has its own sensitivity rating, so 100W from 1 speaker is completely different to another speaker's 100W rating.

[cmndr]

As hinted at, you're NOT going to get good speakers in that price range. 
Your best bet would be going to a thrift store or scouring facebook marketplace/craigslist/estate sales and hoping you find something DIRT CHEAP. Ideally you'd have a good sense of what makes a speaker good (usually having read a bunch of reviews)
You'd still probably need an amp for those. 

 

Kind of the minimum budget for not completely awful is around $150 USD in the US and that's with bargain hunting and being open to something used. 

 

Also, as hinted at wattage doesn't really matter. For a normalish sized room moderately efficient speakers will be TOO loud at ~10W. 

[overbuilt_gaming]

Like the others said you aren't going to get anything good for $40, unless you get lucky.  Never know with FB Marketplace, you might.

 

I strongly recommend the Klipsch THX 2.1 Promedia.  It's an amazing value for around $120usd.  I've been using these for two decades now and am only on my 3rd set.  I sold one set to a friend and one set failed.  Very good track record.  They will rock your house, and if you have an apt, get you in trouble with your neighbor.  

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000062VUO?th=1

 

But be warned these are amazing speakers and if your soundcard is onboard garbage it will sound like it.  I can't comment further until I know what soundcard you have.  I use a Soundblaster X4 External.  

[thrasher_565]

what i recommend....

 

 

Edited October 20, 2023 by thrasher_565

[cmndr]

On 10/19/2023 at 8:30 PM, overbuilt_gaming said:

Like the others said you aren't going to get anything good for $40, unless you get lucky.  Never know with FB Marketplace, you might.

 

I strongly recommend the Klipsch THX 2.1 Promedia.  It's an amazing value for around $120usd.  I've been using these for two decades now and am only on my 3rd set.  I sold one set to a friend and one set failed.  Very good track record.  They will rock your house, and if you have an apt, get you in trouble with your neighbor.  

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000062VUO?th=1

 

But be warned these are amazing speakers and if your soundcard is onboard garbage it will sound like it.  I can't comment further until I know what soundcard you have.  I use a Soundblaster X4 External.  

I've had those. They're pretty good if you get them on sale for around $60-80. You can find it on slickdeals for around that every so often. 
https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?q=promedia

They're not amazing and "onboard sound" has been so good for like... 15ish years that it's not the limit in most situations (ground loops aside). 

 

Most people should NOT be worried about sound cards until they're spending around $1000+ on speakers and even then a used AVR for $100ish is probably fine. I say this as someone that stopped bothering to install my already paid for sound card. Not worth the extra complexity in the system. I also have a $1000 AVR now and a few thousand dollars worth of speakers. I've gone off the deep end. Onboard vs external DAC barely matters outside of the edge case of fighting ground loops if you have powered speakers. 

[overbuilt_gaming]

Some responses are just so bad, you have to appreciate the great ignore features of this forum.  Guys ears are bad and is likely listening to junk compressed audio off of spotify.

[cmndr]

16 hours ago, overbuilt_gaming said:

Some responses are just so bad, you have to appreciate the great ignore features of this forum.  Guys ears are bad and is likely listening to junk compressed audio off of spotify.

I have around $3000 worth of speakers on a $1500 AVR that I've calibrated with measurement microphone in a room that has sound panels in all of the primary reflection points. I've fiddled with this stuff to the point where it's unhealthy and no normal person would appreciate the difference. This doesn't even count the tactile transducers (rumblers) I built into the couch.

A DAC is not going to make speakers that go on sale at Wal-Mart.com [link to deal] for $60 sound night and day better unless your onboard sound is defective (it can happen, especially on the cheapest boards). For $60 they're amazing speakers and I'd recommend them to friends and family. They won't hit 30Hz. They'll have issues with bass management (a single sub in a normal sized room will have issues with wall reflections). They'll... be perfectly fine for most people. 

DACs, Amps, etc. generally matter on the order of 10-10,000x less than good speakers (as measured in dB). The $10ish iPhone dongle is "good enough" to be below the electrical noise floor for a lot of gear, clean power permitting. This general pattern has been verified in blind tests. There's actual scientific literature on this by people with physics/electrical engineering backgrounds and not some dude who learned something from another dude who learned something in 1973. Sources are WAY better and WAY cheaper than even in the 1990s (in the 90s a good sound card mattered). This is also verified by doing tests against various pieces of audio gear and measuring with a calibrated microphone which is more accurate than even the most astute human. Fallible humans "hearing things" that aren't picked up by measurement mics are... questionable.