The best floor speakers will tie together your home audio unit, no matter which model you pick! The cabinet comes in a sleek black oak finish and is built with acoustically inert, furniture-grade MDF to make sure that all it does is hone and project the sound forward. The look is further accentuated when you remove the front grill off to reveal the cool speaker configuration. Each unit is 7.75 x 8.75 x 36.25 inches and weighs 20.35 pounds. This thing is about as affordable as you can ask from a 6-ohm, roaring 100-watt tower speaker. Yamaha’s slim 41-inch tower offers dual 3-1/8th-inch woofers and a 7/8-inch balance dome tweeter which, unfortunately, doesn’t produce huge bass notes thanks to the aforementioned undersized drivers. However, given that you’ll be in a small room and not looking for earth-shattering sound at this price range, the sound is more than good enough. Built and braced with a solid, furniture-like MDF (available in either high-gloss black piano finish or a rich cherry wood), and supported further with quarter-inch baffles, the enclosure on the TSi500 complements the speakers and dampens out almost any artificial acoustic resonance. At the factory, they’ve optimized the frequency response range with a Klippel motor and it’s laser tested to ensure accurate performance up and down the spectrum. And it’s all held up with fat, rubberized feet to make sure virtually no unwanted frequencies are transferred through to your floorboards. Now, let’s talk power; these speakers operate under a sensitivity of 89 dB and have a power handling of 200 watts (though it’ll be more like 90 watts on a continuous basis). They’re compatible at the 8-ohm level, which is standard for a home stereo, and Fluance has even engineered a rear bass port that is slightly dampened around the edges to carry the right bass resonance on the back end without too much of a ring. Each tower is 47.24 x 10.9 x 15.4 inches. In each BP speaker there are two 3.5-inch mid-frequency drivers, a 1-inch tweeter, and that 8-inch subwoofer with built-in 150-watt Class D amp. This package also comes with a matched center channel unit (the CS9040) that features two 4.5-inch mid-frequency drivers, its own 1-inch tweeter and an 8-inch top-firing subwoofer speaker (though this one isn’t powered by a dedicated amp). The designs are also pretty unique as, rather than just opting for an all-black color scheme, Definitive has put some sleek, futuristic silver accents. This isn’t the most affordable pair in the 9000 range, and as such, you’ll pay a premium for the capabilities. But on power and clarity alone, this setup will be hard to beat for those who want movie-quality sound right at home. There’s also a vented tweeter (updated for this model) made of titanium—a fact that seems a bit strange when so many manufacturers opt for silk. Klipsch is saying that the lightweight supports the clarifying capabilities of silk, but the rigidity of titanium gives you more power. Both the tweeter horn as well as the bass port use Klipsch’s Tractix horn technology, which is just their fancy name for a proprietary shape that aims to project sound in specific ways. While there isn’t a dedicated sub involved here, these ports certainly lend themselves to powerful low end, and an ultimately powerful sound spectrum. The other key differentiator is the main woofer pair in each speaker. Rather than building the cones out of metal or some foam polymer, Dali has gone with a wood fiber blend, made of fine paper pulp with a reinforced grain. Dali promises that this will give you a lot more detail, due to the micro-vibrations in the grain itself. There’s also some magic happening with the magnets themselves as Dali has patented an SMC disk, rather than a more traditional iron disk. It’s hard to be sure how well this all works without comparing the environment of these speakers with a more traditional pair, but by all accounts, their research points toward less harmonic distortion. But, if their numerous consumer audio awards are to be believed, in practice, these speakers sound just as good as they look. Sound quality - What sounds amazing to one person might be lackluster to the next. Sound profile is a matter of personal taste, so before buying a speaker, bring along your favorite album and give it a listen. It should sound balanced and easy to listen to for extended periods. Frequency response - Measured in Hertz, frequency response refers to the frequency range that a speaker can reproduce. The average ear can detect a frequency range of 20Hz to 20KHz, so look for a speaker that covers as much of that range as possible.
