Purpose and Price Determine Your Home Speaker System Purchase

One of the more enjoyable choices of a new product for your home is the home theater speakers.  Do you remember the old days of watching television?  The sound came directly at you and the greatest excitement during those years was the introduction of the miracle called stereo!

Those days are gone forever.  Speakers come in all sizes and volumes and are placed discreetly around your entertainment room.  When watching a movie, the traffic noise from the show may come from the right while the chilling scream sounds behind you.  The racing ambulance appears on the right side of the projection screen you are viewing and you hear it coming from your right.   As the vehicle arrives at the accident scene you hear the movement as the sound coming from the right...goes across the room in front of you and then to the left.

For years, the quality of your sound system was often judged by the size of your speakers.  Bigger was always better, but no more.  In many homes, the huge space hogging sound systems have been replaced with a set of small speakers, each of which has it's own job to do.  The sound is divided among the speakers and when placed correctly the result is a clear realistic group of sounds that blend and provide the impression that you are in the center of the sound.

The type of speaker system you choose starts with the purpose you have planned for them.  If listening to great music is your passion, a tower system of balance sound may be what you need.  Two slender towers measuring about 36 inches and 9 inches or so wide provide a clarity of sound not available from shelf type speakers.  Included in the system are small speakers for left, right and center and a bass woofer.  Prices for great quality speaker systems begin at about $1500 and the price will increase with additional watts or with addition of extra features such as a powerful subwoofer, stands, amplifier and high performance cables.

If designing a speaker system for a home theater, there are wide choices in style, quality and price.  For this application, surround sound is the way to go.  The original surround sound products were meant to be as invisible as possible.  New versions are styled to be attractive and become a part of the decor of your home theater. 

Even in lower priced surround systems, the users can enjoy realistic sound quality.  A decent system can be purchased for as little as $300 for a bookshelf system and $600 for a tower system.  The prices, and quality, goes up from there.