Here's a little something for the budget conscious looking for optimal bang for your buck. With work from home ever evolving and settling into my routine I found that I used my DAC a lot for my digital files and streaming, and while headphones are great for after dark when everyone heads to bed, I wasn't a fan of wearing them all day while working. I'd love to listen to vinyl, but work is too distracting to keep an eye on sides coming to an end, lol.
So I started looking for a pair of powered speakers that weren't too expensive but offered up a good sound experience. I even tossed monitors into the mix and
@HayesWeighsIn was nice enough to give me a brand list to check out. I settled in on a pair of Presonus E5's ($125 each), headed to Guitar Center to do a little demoing and of course the ones they didn't have were the Presonus, lol. I did demo Kali, KRK, Makie and their Sterling house brand, but really liked the JBL 305P MKII's ($150 each).
I almost pulled the trigger on them, but since starting this quest I couldn't shake the Edifier brand that kept popping up on every list, review and so on for powered speakers. I did some headphone/youtube comparisons and boy, they really held their own against the JBLs, all taken with a grain of salt of course. So, we decided to use the Amazon easy peezy return process and give the Edifier R1700BTs a roll at
$160 for the pair and if they were a bust they could go back easy enough.
Got them this afternoon..........
Here's the deal, as a set of powered bookshelves at $160 they deserve every positive review and inclusion to any "top" list they're on. They are amazingly musical, with great detail, very dynamic with plenty of bass, and you can tweak the sound a bit with the tone controls. Built really well, solid construction and the one thing that stood out to me was that the "link" cable that usually goes from the active speaker to the passive speaker wasn't just a run of speaker wire, it was a nice, long, 4 pin connector and they also have a sub out if you choose the "thump-thump" needs more, thump
. I gotta be honest, if you have a TT with a built in stage, or are thinking of a "simple" inexpensive system, put these on the list for your speaker choice, you won't be sorry, and they have Bluetooth!! We tend to forget about the budget part of the hobby at times, and this was a nice "refresher" in terms of what you can find at a great price if need be, completely impressed.
These little "discoveries" are the things that continue to make the hobby fun for me
us.kef.com
www.musicdirect.com
