ated or useless. A pair of speakers from 30 years ago still work today, after all, and you’ll find many people still using speakers from over 50 years ago, with modern electronics to power them. Modern speakers are typically better than older speakers due to advances in driver and crossover design, but an older speaker will usually still work and will probably last longer than any other piece of gear you could buy today.
What makes a good bookshelf speaker
Designing speakers requires choices and compromises in configuration and materials, all of which influence the resulting sound. Some choices reflect personal preference on the part of the designer (or the intended audience), while others are due to cost.
Most of the speakers we tested had “two-way” designs. A two-way speaker includes two drivers: a tweeter and a midrange/bass driver (also called a woofer). This is the most common design for bookshelf speakers because of the relatively small space required for the two drivers. This type of design also uses a simpler crossover that has to separate the incoming signal into only two paths: one for the tweeter and one for the midrange/bass driver.
You will also find 2½-way and three-way designs. A 2½-way speaker retains a single tweeter but has two woofers, one that does everything the tweeter doesn’t (as in a two-way design) and an additional woofer that helps out only in the low bass. A three-way design has completely separate tweeter, midrange, and bass drivers.
Moving to multiple drivers can create better sound. As each driver has to reproduce only a limited frequency range, a speaker designer can choose a driver better optimized for those specific frequencies. Such a design also avoids intermodular distortion—artifacts resulting from a single driver that’s trying to produce two different tones at once.
The trade-off with a three-way design is a more complicated crossover (that link is to the Audioholics explanation, in case you want an alternative to Wikipedia’s). And the more complicated the crossover, the more expensive it is to make, and the more small differences in part variances can add up to a noticeable difference in sound. A three-way design also poses a more difficult challenge for the designer, since creating seamless integration between multiple drivers (so music sounds like it’s coming from one speaker) is harder than doing so for just two drivers in a two-way design. All of this complexity means a more expensive speaker.
Speaker manufacturers can make the drivers, especially the tweeter, out of many different materials, and again, these choices can affect the sound. Each material offers its own distinct benefits and drawbacks, but the overall voicing of the speaker plays more of a role than the technology does. Tweeters are most often available as soft domes, using a silk or other cloth material, or metal, using a material such as aluminum. Each of these options presents tradeoffs that speaker designers work around.
Some people believe that metallic tweeters can sound harsh compared with the soft-dome kind, but this impression is largely a byproduct of the speaker’s overall design and not so much the result of a specific material choice. A metal dome is stiffer than a silk or paper dome (and should be able to reproduce high-frequency sounds more effectively), but that stiffness can cause it to resonate more—and thus distort—when pushed too far. Although a soft dome might distort even more easily, its sonic artifacts are different than a metal dome’s and often sound less harsh to the ears.
You can also find tweeters using more exotic materials, such as titanium, beryllium, or even diamond-based materials. These exotic materials get closer to the ideal for a tweeter: especially stiff, to best reproduce high-frequency sounds, but also especially light, to reduce resonant frequencies and thus distort less easily. But such components are usually present only in expensive speakers.
One of the speakers we tested uses a totally different tweeter design called an air motion transformer. AMTs, which resemble a small, compressed accordion, offer some benefits over traditional tweeters, namely a wider frequency range and very flat frequency response. But they’re also more sensitive to off-axis listening. In other words, they can sound very good at the primary listening seat but somewhat worse as you move to the side.
Cabinet construction also plays a role in the sound quality of a speaker. The most noticeable physical difference between the sub-$125 speakers and the more expensive ones is in their weight: The pricier speakers are significantly heavier. Cheaper speakers use thinner materials that are more prone to resonance. The ideal cabinet should be as inert as possible to prevent that resonance from getting into the drivers, where it can produce distortion—or even worse, become audible itself as the whole cabinet rattles.
Speakers also come in three main cabinet designs: sealed, rear-ported, and front-ported. A sealed cabinet has no openings. Ported designs have a port for added bass response on the front or rear of the cabinet. When the bass driver on a speaker moves, it displaces air that then comes out of this port to produce more bass. The feature lets you get higher output at lower octaves from a speaker without adding a larger, and more expensive, driver. The tradeoff is that you need a larger cabinet size compared with a sealed design, and the bass from a port is higher in distortion than that from a driver. You also need to keep the port away from walls, which can be difficult—especially with a rear port—in some situations.
What we listen for
The most important thing to listen for in a speaker is a balanced, neutral sound. Research from scientists such as Dr. Floyd Toole over the past several decades has shown that when judging solely on sound, the vast majority of people prefer a flat frequency response. Many speakers are designed that way, but many others have tweaks intended to produce a sound that the designer prefers.
A common tweak is to boost the high frequencies, or treble. When you first listen, this peaked treble produces the illusion of extra detail when compared with a speaker that is more neutral. But the longer you listen to such speakers, the more that peaked treble will grate on your ears and cause fatigue. When doing our comparisons between speakers, we would notice quickly that one sounded more detailed, but if we pushed the volume up or listened for extended periods, we always wound up disliking the excess treble.
Low frequencies, or bass, represent a challenge for bookshelf speakers. On one hand, you want bass that goes low enough so you can hear almost everything in the music. On the other hand, pushing a five-inch woofer to produce such low tones can be too difficult, and most of those woofers generate poor, flabby bass that you really don’t want to hear. Since a larger cabinet helps create more bass, the larger the bookshelf speaker, the more bass we heard. During our selection process, we wanted to find a speaker that could reproduce bass deep enough to provide a nearly full-range listening experience but didn’t have to strain to reproduce those lowest notes and thus sound flabby or uncontrolled.
One of our most critical elements during testing was the soundstage, or the perceived size of the sound the speaker can produce. When set up in a stereo pair, speakers produce an image that varies in width, depth, and even apparent height. Our ideal soundstage takes up the front of the room, extends beyond the width of the speakers, and has some depth. Some speakers in our tests produced a narrow soundstage that sounded stuck in a small area between the two speakers. Others created a soundstage that seemed to come from inside the walls instead of inside the room. Others produced sound that seemed two-dimensional, with no depth at all. What we were after was a large soundstage in which we felt as if we could hear the positions of the instruments.
How we picked what to test
You can find hundreds of bookshelf speakers out there. Companies have been making them for decades, and every year hundreds of new models arrive. Testing every speaker on the market is impossible because of the number that exist. So the first thing we did was narrow the field down to two price ranges.
First we looked at speakers priced at $125 a pair or less. This type of speaker occupies a much smaller segment of the speaker market, one that many traditional vendors avoid (and on which many Internet direct vendors thrive).
The biggest issue with the models in this price range is that they’ve gotten virtually zero professional reviews. You’ll find some good amateur reviews out there, but other than the Andrew Jones–designed Pioneer models, mainstream reviewers have ignored products in this category. To whittle these choices down, we had to rely on Amazon user reviews and ratings.
The 19 pairs of bookshelf speakers, and their boxes, in the listening room.
In our other category, the $250-to-$400 price range (we discuss more expensive options below), we found models from almost all the major speaker manufacturers—and far more professional reviews. This price range gave us options from almost every major speaker manufacturer. With the exception of a Sound & Vision piece from Wirecutter contributor Brent Butterworth two years ago, however, almost all of the reviews discuss individual speaker sets, not comparisons with other models.
We looked at all of the reviews we could find (and trust), plus customer reviews, to eliminate models that might have problems in real-world use. With so many models on the market, we kept our focus only on the ones that received excellent scores across the board.
How we tested
Once we selected our finalists, we assembled them in my listening room for evaluation. We had a lot of them. Seriously. 19 pairs. We left them with