Wanting to get into HIFI audio. I know NOTHING about HIFI.

[rockinmac]

I was wanting to get a kit like from tube depot and just would like to know what is the best speakers to run with them and would like some info on crossover and how to implement them in the signal chain. THanks!

[Enzo]

The best speakers? Speakers start at a few dollars a side and go up to thousands of dollars a side. They go from handling a few watts up to thousands of watts. They have loud ones, and ones suited for office music. I have some real nice EV bookshelf speakers, small ones like the size of a lunch box. Sound pretty good, but lack bottom. My JBL L100s have much lower response. But until you play both you may not miss the bottom on the small ones. And if you have $100 for speakers, it is pointless to look at the $5000 ones.

Systems are pieces put together, you can always start with pedestrian speakers and replace them with fancier ones later, and at that point you may be better equipped to make educated choices.

Parts Express has LOTS of speakers and speaker related stuff and parts. They sell speaker kits complete, or just the parts, including the wood boxes. It is a place to start. They sell crosovers and crosover parts and have charts to look up values to roll your own. The crossover is just a way to split the sound between woofer and tweeter.

I am sure ther are some beginer hifi forums, I donlt know them though. DIYaudio.com forum is very active though, and might be better suited to your hifi questions.

[Steve Conner]

Depends on what sort of amp kit you're going to buy, what sort of music you want to listen to, how loud, what size of room you have and how much money you want to spend. If you're just starting out, you probably want to avoid a multi-amp setup with active crossovers as it can be very complicated and hard to set up. I recommend you get ordinary hi-fi speakers, which have the crossovers already built in.

Let's say you bought the 16LS stereo amp kit from Tube Depot. It puts out 16W per channel, so you'll need some fairly sensitive speakers. If you wanted to fill a big living room with sound, you'd need some monster horns, but if you were sitting close to the speakers in a small office, bedroom, etc, or in an apartment where too much noise would piss off the neighbours, then you could get away with small bookshelf speakers. You're looking for what some people call "tube friendly" speakers. This thread gives some suggestions.
Most tube friendly speakers? - AudioKarma.org Home Audio Stereo Discussion Forums
Tube-friendly speakers | whathifi.com

If your budget is limited, you could do worse than just buy some bookshelf speakers from Paradigm or Polk.

[bob p]

You may not realize it, but you've asked a question that's really hard to answer.

One thing to keep in mind is that the speaker designs have changed a lot over the years, in tandem with the changing nature of the amplifiers that were available to drive them. In the golden era of the tube, amplifiers were very different than the solid state amps that we have today, and speakers were designed accordingly. Tube amps didn't have much power, so you wanted speakers that were efficient. That isn't a consideration today, as SS amps can deliver hundreds of watts of power. The result is that speaker designers aren't looking for efficiency the way that they used to. Many of them will trade off efficiency to gain flatness in frequency response. Some speakers today have highly specialized crossover networks that employ current sinks to eliminate resonant frequencies in the drivers. The result is that an awful lot of amplifier power can be dissipated into a crossover network; that requires you to have a very high power amplifier, and possibly one that can act as a current source as well.

Something else to consider is that the damping factor of a tube amp is likely to be very different from that of a SS amp, and there are a number of ways that this will effect your system's performance. Speaker designs have changed so much over the past 50 years that you might not get a very good result by using a modern "High End" audio speaker that's designed for SS amplifiers with a tube amp. There are all sorts of things that can screw up the amplifier speaker matching. Box volume, speaker mass, driver compliance, driver/load impedance, amplifier output impedance, the amount of NFB, etc. will all act together to define the resonant frequency of the system, and have audible effects on it's performance.

I guess my point is to say that you're asking a question that's really hard to answer. Many audiophiles go through a lot of trial and error in matching amps to speakers. Perhaps the simplest way to find your way through this maze would be to consider selecting speakers that were designed in the same era as the kind of amplifier that you plan to use to drive them. If you look for a quality hifi speaker that was designed in the era of tube amps, you might find that it functions a little better with a tube amp than a modern speaker that was designed with other objectives in mind. Well, that might work in theory, anyway.

[Mark Hammer]

+1 regarding Parts Express. I just wish shipping to Canada made their prices as competitive as they seem before shipping.

Bob's right about the difficulty in answering your question. In large part, it needs to be answered with other questions.

Conext is going to play a huge huge role in finding some sort of solution to your needs. For example, speakers will sound very different, depending on how they are positioned and what sort of space they are used in, not to mention how loudly they are typically played. Those speaker-use parameters will, in turn, play a role in determining the necessary and/or desirable characteristics of an amplifier.

Many years ago, I was sharing a house with a room-mate who had for more money to spend than I. He bought himself a big pair of Altec-Lansing speakers, and a decent (though not especially audiophile) 100W/ch amplifier. I had some small-ish speakers I had made, with MDF cabinets, powered by an 18W/ch amplifier. Decent amplifier, but still, relatively low-powered, with specs no better than my room-mate's system.

My system kicked the ass of his in most instances, and it bugged him. Why did mine "win" when his ought to have humiliated me, based on specs? Well, all speakers and amplifiers have what many refer to as a "linear operating range". That is, the range of operation where all the specs are conformed to, where the speakers come as close to flat as possible, and the amp has the best distortion characteristics. Folks are familiar with things going off-spec when pushed too hard, but much less familiar with things being off-spec when not pushed nearly hard enough. His speakers were effectively too large for the listening space they were used in. As a result, he rarely powered them with more than a watt of power, at typical listening levels, and both the amp underperformed, and the speakers were anything BUT flat. They were also big enough boxes that he had to sit them on the floor and out of the way in the corners, where they honked. In contrast, my smaller and somewhat less efficient speakers were "in the zone". For comparable listening levels, I had to push mine a little harder than he pushed his. My speakers came out as flat and full-range as he was hoping for from his, and my amp was above the low-power danger zone where distortion specs can sometimes be as bad as with the volume control dimed.

I mention all of this to emphasize that there are some hypothetical "bests" that really only function that well under a specific set of presumed circumstances, and outside of those circumstances, are not as effective and pleasing as what might seem, in the abstract, as 2nd or 3rd tier. You need to think about your listening environment first, and then work backward from there. So, YES, a higher-powered amplifier provides more headroom...in theory...but if you aren't going to run it at more than 1W, chances are pretty good you will not experience much of that clean headroom. AQnd so on.

As for advice and reading material, try and find a copy at your public or university library of either the earlier or later editions of the Audio Cyclopedia, this one: Amazon.com: Audio Cyclopedia (9780672206757): Howard M. Tremaine: Books or this one: Handbook for Sound Engineers: The New Audio Cyclopedia: Amazon.ca: Glen M. Ballou: Books

[Mick Bailey]

I favour low-wattage tube amps driving simple, efficient speaker loads. Take a look at Fostex full-range drivers and what people are doing with them. I built a RH807 amp for a customer and he's astounded by it through a pair of folded horn enclosures. Can't be much more than 3w per channel, max.