> "While commercial musical equipment is usually of quite usable quality, commercial speakers unfortunately are not, unless you go to exotic and extremely expensive brands. The reason is simple: Good speakers, by law of physics, need to be large. There is no way around this basic fact."
Is this as true as it was in the 1990's?
A lot of people have high-end small speaker systems with branding such as 'Bose' on the front. Maybe they have got old and their ears have changed, but even if they once had big-box speakers due to the physics reasons, they have moved to the small speaker 5.1 things and it is now okay to do that. The sub-woofer doesn't have to be stereo either.
I don't know, but has new thinking fundamentally changed how hi-fi is done from the twin speaker stacks of old with lots of tweeters/woofers/crossovers to these new-fangled mini-5.1 things?
Low frequency response needs size. If you're willing to cutoff at 200 Hz then little stuff will work. In my high school years I built a stereotypical mono subwoofer of the 2x4 sheet of plywood for front and back variety. Sounded pretty good, but could have been better.
A mantra thats repeated continuously, mostly by people selling mono subwoofers or uninterested in audio reproduction, is low freqs are non-directional.
Yet I go outside and listen to thunderstorms and passing unmuffled motorcycles and firearms and much bigger .mil weaponry and it sounds highly directional. I can point at the rumble of distant artillery as well as any other sound.
Surely if you build a directional subwoofer system and can only perceive a field, that'll work OK even if its an economic financial fail. But the other way around is an epic fail. So save money at the risk of sounding bad. Well, if the point is spending money to sound good, having an extra 3 dB of signal is never a loss...
Another puzzle is I know from experience that L-R and L+R sound different from FM subcarrier detection. Supposedly mono subwoofer people claim that magically only applies to higher freqs. I would think a single mono channel subwoofer would sound "better" fed off only L or R channel than some peculiar mix of unknown phase. The problem is which channel to connect to?
Phase relationships are a pretty big puzzle in audio once you get past simple response problems and simple distortion problems.
All sound waves are directional, but the point made by acousticians is that in any enclosed space with dimensions smaller than the wavelength in question (56 feet for 20Hz), low frequencies are effectively non-directional because they fill the entire space (with nulls at various points). The wavelength of high frequencies means you can orient their direction in the room.
Of course you won't hear this outdoors because the sounds are not in an enclosed space.
I'd suggest that the reason mini speakers are popular has to do with aesthetics since they are often paired with a television in a multipurpose room. And with the advent of 5.1, having five full range speakers, wiring, and a subwoofer in a small living room doesn't pass the aesthetic test.
Bose and other manufacturers have done a good job of developing tricks that fool undiscerning listeners into thinking their system matches the performance of a full range system. But there's no tricking out the physics of low frequencies. Baffles and complex tube resonators can have limited positive effects but they often cause problems in other areas.
That said, unless all you care about is sound quality, the aesthetics and performance of a Bose system can in many cases be very attractive.
Is this as true as it was in the 1990's?
A lot of people have high-end small speaker systems with branding such as 'Bose' on the front. Maybe they have got old and their ears have changed, but even if they once had big-box speakers due to the physics reasons, they have moved to the small speaker 5.1 things and it is now okay to do that. The sub-woofer doesn't have to be stereo either.
I don't know, but has new thinking fundamentally changed how hi-fi is done from the twin speaker stacks of old with lots of tweeters/woofers/crossovers to these new-fangled mini-5.1 things?