Stereophile's list of "Best top 25 speakers of past 40 years".

[jrhymeammo]

Where did you see Apogee Grand's for $5k? .

Oops. I have totally forgot about this post. I made a mistake, what I mean to say was Diva. Grand for $5k? Not a chance. I would even buy it for $70k in a heart beat.

-JRA

[hermanv]

Perhaps I'm missing something here. A decent audiophile quality sub costs about $1,000 and up, you really should use two, it sounds better.

Now to keep it relative, good audiophile speakers start at about $5,000. Yes I know there are many quite decent speakers for less, but to get that hard to define elegance you need to spend near that amount or more not counting good electronics and cables to run the things.

So as to what I'm missing why can't those same 5K and up speakers deliver kick ass bass? Adding a grand per speaker to the expensive models almost gets lost in the pricing, worse a sub added to an exisiting cabinet should have some savings from reduced duplication of box, feet, connectors etc.

My friend and I designed our own 3 way. Using a Scanspeak 10" woofer with an Fs of 19.5 Hz (better than many sub woofers) we get honest bass to 20 Hz. The driver is under $200 retail, I'm sure it's less for OEMs. Like all speakers that deliver decent bass cabinet sizes go up, you can't get there from here with small boxes. Those tiny subs with slope or servo correction and massive amps just don't seem to end up sounding very musical.

My point is that good bass can be done especially at the 5K and up price points. One big problem (pun intended) is the size of the damn things.