Two channel audio/cd 'hi-fi' on a budget

Ultra budget:
Lepai 2020TI amp, Dayton Audio b652 ( b652) or t652 ( t652).
The Lepai is $40ish. The Daytons are -$50/150 depending on the form factor. The class T Dayton amp is $20 and a venerable honorable mention for an inexpensive hi fi system. It would be difficult to surpass the value of the sound you’ll get here without an upgrade in price.


So let’s look at a bump up:
Aiyima has a cute little desktop amp with vu meters that is an ok headphone or power amp.
Emotiva makes a reasonably priced stereo amp and has a good reputation- this one I have not heard
My last Dayton recommendation on the list. I have this set up as a monoblock for my center channel in one of my systems. It kicks arse for the value. I previously had it powered by a Marantz SR6011 (which is sort of cracking the surface of receivers that are worth a damn at amplification. The difference was so noticeable that my wife noticed and commented on it!).
And then there’s the Vista Spark which is probably the most amp you’re going to find in this range

So you’ve got about a $100, 200, 250, 350-400 option for amps that I think nearly anyone could at the very least respect.


Now for the speakers:
Elac has several nice options that will pair with your budget well
Tekton Lore is in this range as well and people who have them tend to rave about them
Emotiva makes towers too, but I’ve never put ear to them.
KEF q-series would fall in the top end of the budget


This all presumes you’re talking about $1000-1500 without source inputs (the computer is the input and the others come later). Perhaps I misunderstood.



But welcome to the rabbit hole. This is in no way a comprehensive list, and there’s a pretty great thread on the music board about this stuff with lots of great folks who will point you in the right direction better than I can. There’s a dead thread somewhere that Marco started about budget gear if you can find it.

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Thanks Doc. Bringing some good tech info to the tech board.

My choice at $1500 or under.

Focal Chora 806 which are a SCREAMING deal at Crutchfield right now for $400 off so they are $600. These are incredibly well made and have a very neutral sound for the price tag, especially on sale. Crutchfield

Yamaha A-301S integrated amp for $350. It is also well built and has a subwoofer output and a variable loudness control which is VERY useful if you don't plan to run a sub. It also has a built-in DAC so you can run digital inputs. This is the least expensive of their new excellent line of integrateds and if you want to move up the price range they run from $349 to $8000 if you really want to splurge... but you would need better speakers.

Crutchfield You may be able to find it cheaper elsewhere.

If you want to add a sub which you might as the Focals are a little light in the bass slam region then I suggest either the SVS PB1000 at $500 ($449 if you prefer a sealed sub) SVS Or the RSL Speedwoofer 10S MkII RSL

With the above, you can start at under $1000 and add a sub later if you like. The Focals are really a good starting point to build around, at the current sale price it is hard to do better and that new line of Yamaha integrated are excellent for the price.


Black and walnut options are in stock now







RSL



Ported SVS




If you want to skip the sub and go floorstander instead (I really like the bookshelf sub combo until you get to about $3000) then here are some choices that still fit your budget with the Yammy integrated:

Focal Chora 816
Paradigm Monitor SE6000F
PSB Imagine X1T
Elac Debut 2.0 F6.2

I appreciate all the input. Still keeping an eye on all replies. Sorry if I don't reply to each one.

If you don't want to read a technical nightmare, which I didn't not proof, about things you likely will never care about (but it will impact the found from your speakers) skip down to the lower section after the emoticon for some extremely important information that will make every stereo system better. Never mind go to the next post the hamsters said this one was too long

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Just realize that bookshelf is a misnomer because they almost always do not perform as well as they would on speaker stands.

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Generally yes. However, if the speaker is sealed, front ported, or (the very rare for a small speaker) has a front passive radiator you start to deal with a double edged sword. First, you have speaker boundary interference response (SBIR) which produces boundary induced comb filtering. This produces large bass dips (cancellation) at the 1/4 wave distance from the wall. The reflected sound then has traveled 1/2 wave length by the time it comes back and meets the direct sound wave and makes a huge dip in the response. The two ways to deal with this are to put them very close to the manufacturer minimum distance to the wall thus shifting the SBIR frequency as high as possible. As frequency goes the speakers become less omni-directional so there is less energy to reflect and cancel the direct wave. The other option is to place the speaker far enough into the room that the SBIR frequency is lower than the speaker can produce. Note SBIR comb filtering can NOT be EQed out. No matter how much you try to boost the dip (ie with a high Q parametric filter) by increasing the amplitude of the direct wave you are doing the same thing to the reflective wave. Since this normally happens in the bass region you are just cranking up the excursion of the bass driver (in a small two-way it would usually be classified as a mid-woofer) which increases distortion, increases coil temperatures significantly (don't wanna melt the varnish on the windings or the magic smoke comes out), or the driver hits Xmech and it sounds like banging (on metal) bongos like a chimpanzee. Apologies to Dire Straights.

The alternate often competing for issue is baffle step compensation. While SBIR is an issue with low frequencies baffle step impacts the high frequencies. I will try to limit the technical explanation but will be happy to expand if anyone cars to read it. When the sound waves propagate from a tweeter they have short wavelengths. The waves expand in hemispherical fashion so frequencies shorter than half the width of the speaker baffle (assuming the tweeter is centered) will radiate in half space and ones longer will radiate in full space as this edge diffraction causes a pressure differential. To sum it up (tired of typing and my rambling explanation has lost anyone that doesn't already understand baffle step) this causes a lot of dips and peaks like a ripple in the on-axis frequency response. Normally a designer will design a baffle step compensator into the crossover of the speaker which is a resistor and inductor wired in parallel prior to the positive input on the tweeter and normally you would wire a Zobel circuit (a resistor and capacitor wires in series across the positive and negative inputs of the tweeter electrically after the baffle step) to reduce impedance rise. These are all calculated from Re and Le of the speaker (shall we discuss Thiele-Small parameters) along with the width of the baffle and the attenuation needed which is normally 6dB. I should also point out this is also mitigated by using a narrow baffle near at the tweeter, having the tweeter offset in the baffle, having angled baffles or having no baffle like the bullet tweeters in the B&W 70x and 80X series speakers.

All that to say the depending on how the crossover was designed putting a speaker close to the wall could over accentuate the treble and introduce a ripple in the high freq response or leave a speaker with a falling high frequency response if it is too far from the wall. Normally this will be covered in the manual not technically but just with a recommended distance from the wall.

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I was remiss in not mentioning the most important part of a good sounding systems no matter how many or few zeros are at the end of the price. Speaker/Room interaction.

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Now that's the truth. $200 on some motel-grade rugs and paintings can make a huge difference.

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Electrically, resistance is bad if you are trying to move power in a circuit. I'll clearly defer to the other people in the thread that seem to do this for a living, but if you put a bunch of high resistance (high ohm devices, in speakers that generally means an 8ohm speaker as opposed to a 4 ohm speaker) outputs on a circuit that comes out of the receiver, that means the receiver has to work harder to accomplish less. Basically.

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TLDR in home hifi 8 ohm speakers are easier loads for an amplifier than 4 ohm load.

shite, I am going to have to be the akshully guy.

In the limited world of speakers and amplifiers a higher resistance coil (higher nominal resistance ie 8 ohm) in a driver is actually an easier load on the amplifier than a low resistance coil (lower nominal resistance ie 4 ohm).

In general most hifi speakers are either 4 or 8 ohms nominal resistance. You occasionally see 6 ohm loads and sometimes very low impedance subwoofers with 1 ohm or 2 ohm coils normally with dual (2) voice coils.

All one really needs to know is 4 ohm speakers are harder to drive than 8 ohm speakers and if you consider 4 ohm speakers you need to ensure the amp you have can drive them which also requires you to look at their efficiency as well. A 4 ohm speaker with a low sensitivity say 83dB @ 1w/1m in simple terms is going to be a hard load for an amplifier. Note efficiency and sensitivity are not the same but often used interchangeably and I will avoid the urge to explain that unless someone really wants to do some logarithms.

So why does an amplifier "see" low resistance as a "more difficult" load than a higher resistance speaker. While it sounds counterintuitive it all comes down to current.

Think of electricity as water. Voltage is the pressure and current is the volume. Ohms law lets us play with those values along with resistance but we really don't need values. A "standard" speaker driver makes sound by vibrating a cone back and forth. The cone's movement is produced by a coil moving inside a permanent magnet. The movement is a result of alternating current being sent through the coil by the amp the cone will vibrate at the frequency of the current. So a 60hz alternating current will result in a 60 hertz tone being produced by the speaker. The next key is to make it louder (higher amplitude) you need more voltage across the coil, a low impedance coil requires a lot more current to produce that voltage. Back to ohms law V(voltage)=I(current) x R(isistance).

Returning to water. With a low impedance speaker again 4 ohms it is like a large water pipe with little resistance it takes a lot of water (current) to reach say 40 psi (voltage). If you reduce the size of the pipe the resistance increases but it takes much less water (current) to get the same pressure (voltage). The reason an amp sees a harder load with the lower resistance is it has to move more current and our household electrical supply depends on voltage to do work vs current to do work. High voltage low current relatively speaking. The opposite occurs in a car electrical system it uses low voltage and high current to do equal amounts of work. This is why you see many reasonably cheap car amps able to run very low impedance loads of say 2, 1 or even 1/2 ohm comfortably. If you try to do that with a 120v amp you would need a massive power supply in the amp and a large bank of capacitance.

So very simply a low impedance speaker is a harder load for a home amplifier because it requires so much current.




No for some marginally related info. Speaker impedance (resistance) is rated in ohms and it is given a nominal impedance. However, the impedance of a single driver or a multiple driver "speaker" will have an impedance that varies significantly across the frequencies it can produce. So to really understand the load a speaker represents you need to look at the trace of frequency vs impedance looking for how low the impedance drops and how much of the passband stays low. The 4 ohm or 8 ohm is just shorthand for the speaker companies so people can digest it. However, you can have 8 ohm speakers that are hard to drive relative to most 8 ohm speakers and 4 ohm speakers that are relatively easy to drive compared to most 4 ohm speakers.

To show the variance in impedance over frequency for a single driver I have modeled a subwoofer driver in WinISD it is just a large 18" sub modeled in a smallish ported box but we don't need to delve into how box alignment impacts impedance... but it does. In audio EVERYTHING effects everything else and is why great speakers are difficult to produce because every aspect of the system has positive and negative effects and you keep having to balance all those pros and cons.

Here is a modeled trace of the impedance. I have the program set up to only show the frequencies between 10hz and 200hz because that is more than the passband you would use for this driver. See how the impedance has peaks of 25 and 30 ohms but the majority of the trace sits down around four ohms. This is what someone would consider a 4 ohm speaker.



Now to get an understanding of current/power needed I will put up a trace of the same driver in the same box with randomly 1000 watts of input power. The units of measure are volt/amperes which just like watts is a measure of power which indicates the amount of current required.




The key to notice here is the impedance goes up the VA go down which requires less current from the amp and thus an easier load electrically. I set the cursor on both graphs at the same 13.61 hertz frequency.

As an aside notice how the impedance drops very low and the VA run very high right at 20 hertz? That is because the box I modeled has a 20hz tuning, below I changed the tuning to 30 hz and you can see the impedance dip shift right over to 30hz. This is how you can electrically determine the tuning of a ported box that is not known. Measure impedance while running a slow frequency sweep and the low frequency nadir is the tuning frequency.




I always tell people if you want to really digest the complexity of speaker design and learn how all the electrical and mechanical parameters of a speaker interact with each other download WinISD (its free) and play around with some subwoofer designs. Subs are remarkably simple beasts and because we don't hear that well at low frequencies it allows some compromises and errors to go unnoticed. When you get a feel for how you have to compromise with every mechanical and electrical choice you get an understanding of how complex a 2way/3way or 4way speaker is to design because when you add each driver it has its own full set of electrical and mechanical choices which all interact and then you have to deal with how all those drivers acoustically interact with each other, especially near the crossover points. This gives one a great understanding of how special a really good speaker is and how hard it is to accomplish.


I didn't have time to proof this, I hope it is somewhat intelligible but I doubt it I suffer from scope creep constantly wanting to add more useless facts.

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I suffer from scope creep constantly wanting to add more useless facts

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I see you also kept it simple.