Top 5 Tips To Consider When Buying Your Home Audio Equipment…
1. Auditioning speakers for your audio system
When it comes to buying speakers, which let’s be honest are the be all and end all of your audio system, you absolutely need to try before you buy. This means being prepared to take music that you know and love along with you to the speaker store and asking to listen to it through the speakers you’re interested in.
You need to make sure that you’re completely happy with what you can hear; otherwise it’s best to keep looking. Keep in mind that the better the quality of speakers, the better quality of sound you will get, so it is worth buying at the higher end of your budget than the lower end.
2. Be prepared to use cool off periods and 30-day guarantees
Even if you manage to listen to all your favourite records through the speakers in the store, you will never know what the sound’s truly going to be like until you get the speakers home. Therefore the best thing you can do is buy speakers where you’re going to get a cool-off period or a 30-day guarantee, where you can return the speakers and get a full refund if you are not happy with them.
The room in which you store your speakers will be very different to the speaker store, for instance it may have less furniture, floor tiles instead of carpet and may be long and rectangular instead of square. All these things can have an effect on the sound quality, so you really do need to install the speakers at home and take advantage of the store’s return and refund option if you need to.
3. Buy accessories
Many people get carried away with buying all the main bits of equipment, such as the speakers, the subwoofer and cables and forget all about the little accessories that can help your set up go a lot smoother and produce a much more organised and neat result.
For instance, banana plugs make life a lot easier rather than having to deal with bare wire and are also a lot tidier, plus you can buy them at a very reasonable price. Using speaker cable termination plates will also give you a much tidier result, instead of having tons of unruly cables coming out your wall. So, don’t forget about the little things when buying the big things!
4. Label EVERYTHING
Even if you think you will always be able to remember where everything goes, it is a good idea to have a stock of sticky labels before you start putting your brand new system together. This way, you can label things (especially the cables) as you start putting everything together.
You’ll be very thankful for the labels a few years down the line when you decide to move house and are able to put everything back together incredibly easily and quickly in your new home.
5. Consider the size of room you’re buying for
This is an area where a lot of people tend to make mistakes, especially in a large room. Simply because so many think that if they just crank the volume up on their two speakers, the sound will be of the same quality as it would be if they had five speakers dotted about the room. The truth is, quite simply, if you have a large room, you should have more speakers.
In a large room, an increased number of speakers at a lower volume will be ideal and result in a nice sound at all points of the room, whereas if you only have a few speakers, at a higher volume, you will end up with places in the room where the sound quality is just too loud.
