There are some incredible bargains to be had today in the world of home audio. Thanks to competition from increasingly skilled overseas companies, the stalwarts of the industry have become better and better about delivering value, so that an entry-level system today puts to shame much more expensive ones of years earlier. The situation is just as good as one moves upward on the budgetary scale, too; at every level one receives more for one’s money than ever in history. Even high end audio speakers have succumbed to this phenomenon, often offering incredible value despite being part of a market segment where this was previously sometimes hard to find.
For example, buyers looking for speakers based on planar-magnetic technology no longer need to expect to come away wincing over their wallets. Manufacturing advances motivated by competition from other less-sophisticated technologies have led to techniques allowing true mass production of these high-fidelity speakers. Today, speakers based on this once-rare principle stand alongside traditional cone speakers on store shelves and in terms of price, so that shoppers who would previously have had to have written them off as too expensive can enjoy their crystalline sound reproduction.
High-end tweeter technology has advanced just as much. Various sorts of ribbon-based technologies, as well as tweeters incorporating expensive, rare metals and other substances are much more widely available than in the past. This greater level of choice has enabled designers and manufacturers of high end audio speakers to pick the perfect individual voice coils for each given speaker design, instead of being bound by budgetary and similar considerations. Today’s speakers in this price range, then, are much more likely to be the no-compromise instruments that their price tags would seem to imply, and they often perform far better than even more expensive speakers from years ago.
While this situation is overall an extremely positive one for those in the market for new speakers, it can seem overwhelming to some. Getting qualified, experienced help is the best way to overcome this issue, so that even many relatively informed audiophiles can benefit from relying on the services of a local store which specializes in high end audio. In particular, assistance of this sort can help to point out which of the vast array of sound reproduction technologies are likely to work best in a given room and for a given type of music.
