tired of wasting money

Don't believe reviews. Get out and listen to them somewhere yourself.

Transducers (speakers and microphones) all have their own unique tonal qualities. So what sounds great to one person may not sound so good to someone else. In a nutshell speaker quality is as much or more subjective than it is about specs. You must decide for yourself it you like the timbre of a speaker line.

OK, you bought the equipment and brought it home and hooked it up. Past that I can't tell what happened other than I somehow get the feeling that you aren't pleased with the results.

More specifically, what is your problem?

IME that is a waste of time. Speakers are profoundly affected by the rooms they are in and even where in those rooms they are emplaced. Listening evaluations in other locations might allow you to stop considering some really bad speakers that would sound bad in just about any room. Beyond that, what can you determine from a listenening evaluation of speakers in the wrong room?

Maybe your room is terrible. Does it have lots of hard flat surfaces (walls, floor, etc.)? That would be counter to a 'warm' sound.

If the listener has a lot of experience evaluating speakers and understands how the room affects speakers, a lot can be determined. But for most people this is not the case. If listening to a pair of speakers in a foreign room, the speakers should be well away from boundaries, as well as the listening position. Everything bass should be ignored. And tonal balance should be listened for. Don't pay attention to imaging. Also, listen for distortion/compression while turning things up. Bring your own music/test tracks and and spl meter is helpful. If comparing speakers, take notes.

Based on what you've written above you'll know that placing your speakers on either side of a TV up against the back wall is limiting. Most reviewers have purpose arranged rooms, with a layout of furniture and equipment that allows for the best possible audio audition. Not to mention a broad imagination for equipment.



EQing is the single best way to better a residential audio system, IMO.

Sounding harsh at high volumes suggests lots of hard walls. You should seriously consider some room treatments -- absorbers or diffusers at the first reflection points, for example. You could start with heavy drapes and/or bookshelves with a random assortment of book sizes on the side walls.

The other primary cause of distortions at high volumes would be inefficient speakers with a weak amp in a large room, resulting in clipping, but you have highly efficient speakers in a medium sized room. What model is your Marantz receiver, though? NR or SR series? NRs are designed with a lower power output so they can be squeezed into a smaller chassis.

A 1inch flush mounted dome doesn't have much balls to cross at 1.9khz, especially with few components the way most commercial speakers do it. Quite likely you're getting tweeter strain at higher volumes. Especially if using some eq to bump up a weak point frequency for the tweeter. Also, 8 ohms nominal but this is misleading. It's really 4ohms where it counts. In the 200hz range no doubt. There's a lot of demand in this region. And 93.5db sensitivity from a 2.5 way with 2 6.5" woofer that can hit 33hz is probably misleading. Even high end scan speaks can't do that. I'm not sure it's even 90db.

So the question is, how loud do you listen? If you listen loud (near reference), ya these will be struggling for sure. If you listen at like -20db or something, that's probably not your issue unless your eq is really wonky. Avoid boosts more than 3db.

Are you streaming Spotify in the highest quality?

Hype. And there is no "match" for your marantz, as it doesn't have a particular "sound." Being well designed, it is transparent, meaning it will sound identical to other such well designed amps/avr's.

Now, the problem of how to audition speakers balancing practicality with good information that is applicable to your room is a tough one.

That does not seem logical. If the room profoundly affects the sound quality of the speaker, which we know to be true, then what we hear must be 25%, 50& or more due to the room.

We may still be able to hear differences among different loudspeakers in the room, but those differences may be biased by the room.

For example the room has a bright bias. An ideal speaker will sound too brignt in the room, and what we hear will make us want to choose a speaker that is in general a poorer speaker.


In general moving speakers away from room boundaries makes them sound bass-shy and thin. It is just another confusing bias.

So you admit that we can't judge a speaker's bass or balance?

Why is it correct to judge balance when you already said that the bass is to be ignored?

If that is so, then we have a large area of speaker performance that we can't evaluate. Why are we punishing ourselves this way to get only fragmentary evidence?

Oh boy, I see why I never bother to come here. Like I said, you have to understand how the room affects the sound. Are you in a glass room with a concrete floor? Or a carpeted drywall room with lots of diffusion. I'm not recommending this for most people. You have to ignore bass because it's much to variable. When I talk about balance I mean midrange and treble balance. Not balance with the bass. You move the speaker away from boundaries to keep it free from reflections. If it sounds thin, that's ok if you plan to place it tight to boundaries in your home. This is why the evaluator needs to be knowledgable and experienced doing this. Not helpful for most people.

When I voice a cross over, I have to know how it'll sound in everyone's room. Impossible, sure. But the science is clear that most residential home rooms require flat direct (anechoice) sound with a uniform off axis response (power response). This can be evaluated by listening in any typical room. You just need to know what you're listening for. I always ignore bass when I voice a speaker because it's way to variable. I only rely on measurements for port tuning and cab volume. If I voice bass for my room, it'll be wrong in your room. And when I evaluate another speaker I know nothing about, I also ignore the bass. Sure it can be tricky to make decisions on lower midrange to upper bass tonal balance when you do this, but it's something we have to live with.

Imagin is largely a product of both the direct sound of a recording and the room reflections. Unless you can decipher both, you can't properly evaluate imaging. And personally, I don't agree with evaluating imaging. To many people are tricked by reflections. If the speaker has flat direct sound, uniform power response, good driver control in the cross over, in a proper room, with the listener in the sweet spot it will image well. By imagin I mean a stereo image where instruments and voices are where they belong. Anything less is unsatisfactory imo.

By this I mean I hope I don't confuse people or make people think listening to a speaker on a shelf at best buy from 4 feet away is a reasonable way to assess a speaker. I think Harmon was doing some listening training or something. Something like that would be useful for people interested in this sort of thing.

It's impossible to know, but if you're close to walls, early reflections can be bad and cause listener fatigue. If you play action movies with demanding peak levels, that little dome is probably hurting. Those are my suspicions but there may be other issues. Can you return them? Just return them and say they don't sound good...

If you can, and you're placement limited, you should pick a speaker that suits your restrictions. One thing a 6.5" plus 1" dome tweeter does poorly is off axis reflections. There's always a ridge in the off axis pattern near the cross over. The fact that its a low xo helps. But then power handling suffers. Look for something with a low cross over and a 29mm dome, or a mild waveguide, or a smaller mid 3-way.

All this is speculation without knowing what's really wrong. It may just be the speaker has poor frequency response.

I don't think that the Energy Veritas speakers are exceptionally weak. Let's face it, both the Veritas and most of their competition are essentially the same speaker, namely one or two 5-6.5 inch woofer(s) and ca, 1" dome tweeter, Those two parameters define a lot of the sonics of the speakers and how they interact with the room.

There are lots of things that can be done to a speaker to make it work better in an iffy location in an iffy room. Your best solution is to upgrade the iffy room. You may be able to mitigate the restrictions on speaker placement by improving room acoustics.

As far as a warmer sound goes, your AVR has both Audyssey Multieq and manual equalization features that can be used to warm up the sound of your speakers and your room.
Edited by arnyk - 3/13/13 at 7:58pm

I never saw any reason to think that I could pick good speakers by in-store auditions, and I never tried that. But I have found two approaches that worked for me. One is to buy very very cheap speakers, $5-$15, at used stores or garage sales and take them home to try out. If I couldn't find a way to make them sound good, I just tossed them and shopped for more.

The other way that has worked is looking at lots of subjective and objective review material -- off-axis frequency response curves, for instance, and buying on the basis of the reviews. Soundstage used to publish a bunch of graphs from tests done at the National Research Council of Canada. E.g., here is what I looked at after reading a long favorable review in this forum (now archived) from user "Tom Bombadil" of the Axiom M2i.

Audyssey is an automated system optimization facility. It has a microphone and runs some automatic tests and cooks up a digital filter that may address some audible shortcoming of your audio system. There is plenty of evidence that it can help in many cases, but might not help in every case.


Given that you have some pretty good gear and are not totally pleased with it, and that Audyssey could help, it seems like it would be worthwhile and cost you nothing out of pocket to give it a try.

Hear, hear!

Hear the difference Audyssey can make!

I'm assuming the energys are replacing whatever other speakers you previously had.Did you re do the setup(audessy) in the marantz when you got the energy's? To my understanding those energy's are decent speakers and your marantz should not have any problems driving them.Never heard them so cant help you there but maybe they are just too bright for your liking.

Definitely run Audessey. Even if you don't like the result, study at the EQ curves to see if there are any notable peaks/valleys. you may find an EQ valley at 1-2khz