Of all computer parts I have bought over the years, my best purchase is, by far, studio-quality monitors (I’ve yet to buy a good lcd – student salaries etc.). All performance-sensitive components: hard drives, CPUs, motherboards etc., eventually die or simply become obsolete as better, cheaper versions become available. When it comes to performance, I’ve always settled for “the most bang for the buck”, as all these components are ephemeral; putting 1000$ in a graphics card will do little to prevent its rapid obsolescence.

Quality peripherals, however, don’t get obsolete so fast, if at all. The best LCD monitors, 7 years ago, were 30” 2560x1600 IPS panels selling for 1200-2000$, at that’s still the case today. Good speakers can last you a lifetime, so does a proper ergonomic chair. I find it intriguing that most hardware-related discussions on tech forums like this revolve around graphic cards and cpus, and people end up pairing top-of-the-line PCs with cheap, small TN panels and terrible excuses for speakers that ruin everything these computers output. In fact, I remember John Carmack at the last QuakeCon deploring how they spend all this energy and gpu power making sure all graphics calculations are gamma-correct when most monitors aren’t even remotely well calibrated and end up completely destroying the picture balance.

Anyway, this post is about the culmination of many months of research I made last year to buy myself the best audio experience I could afford as a lowly university student. Having worked in composition and musical research in professional studios, I consider myself at least acquainted with audiophile-grade equipment, and I would settle for nothing less than something professional sound designers use. My budget, however, was around 600$; much more than your typical “computer speakers”; much less than your typical reference monitors though.

A quick search on the available options revealed a world of choices and decisions to make which quickly overwhelmed me, however. Buying a set of quality speakers, you have to decide, among others:

• Active (powered) vs passive speakers?
  
• If going passive, what amplifier to get?
  
• Frequency response: accurate or “pleasing”?
  
• 2-way, 3-way? Size of woofers?
  
• How to prevent or eliminate sources of noise and ground loops?
  
• To get a subwoofer or not?
  
• Will my onboard sound card suffice?
  
• Do cables really matter?

Now keep in mind I’m no expert, but these are the answers I found for myself:

• Active means I don’t have to buy an amp, so less expense and no need to decide what amp to buy, how to connect it to my computer, etc. Some of the best models I was looking at were active monitors as well, so I settled on that.
  
• Solved by simply not going passive.
  
• Since I listen to the widest range of material, most of which isn’t highly compressed (orchestral, choral etc.), and I’m rather audiophile, I want my speakers to represent the material with as much fidelity as possible and that means flat (accurate) frequency response. The tradeoff here is that accurate speakers really expose bad recordings and low bitrates as such, but I’m fine with that. Most “hi-fi” speakers adjust the frequency response to make all those highly compressed rock recordings and Youtube videos sound better than they should, but throw some lossless classical or choral at them and they quickly fall apart. Also, these speakers will be sitting on my desk at about a meter from my ears, so combine everything we’ve discussed so far, and we’ve limited our search to “active near-field monitors”.
  
• I found that in my price range, the best monitors were all 2-way, and the sweet spot for woofer size was 7-8”. This is the size where you start hearing those sub-80hz frequencies well and without unduly distortion to the rest of the spectrum.
  
• This quickly proved to be a subject of endless discussion on tech forums, so I decided to wait until the monitors arrive, plug them on my integrated sound card and judge afterwards. The thing is, your typical crappy computer speakers are not grounded, so they sidestep this problem entirely, but quality monitors typically are. The actual sound output from the motherboard turned out to be decent, but because both the monitors and the computer were grounded into the same source, a nasty ground loop formed which produced an insane amount of noise. It was unusable. I needed to externalize the sound source and isolate it electrically. I needed something cheap, usb-powered, with ¼” jacks: at 50$, the Art USB Dual Pre external sound card was the perfect fit (it also has XLR inputs, which I didn’t need), and the Olimex USB-ISO at about another 30$ provided the necessary power isolation (since USB cables carry power, they don’t isolate by themselves). For a total of about 80$, I believe this is the quickest and cheapest means of getting pristine audio signal for your monitors unless you have the luxury of two electrically isolated power sources.
  
• This was rather easy to settle, as I quickly realized a good subwoofer would mean half of my budget going into the 20-200hz range, and the remaining 200-20000hz suffering as a result. Besides, subwoofers tend to exaggerate the low range, I wasn’t sure how well they would crossover with the monitors, and I was mainly concerned with having accurate frequency response. Also, I didn’t know how I would plug it, and I could always add one later. One year later, I have yet to find the need for one.
  
• As I explained in 5), I decided to postpone this decision to after I bought the speakers and tried them on the soundcard. I believe its sound quality was decent enough, but the ground loop issue forced me to switch to an external sound card. Plus, the external sound card provided me with two ¼” jacks rather than having to use a flaky 1/8” to stereo ¼” adapter.
  
• Short answer, cables do not matter as far as I can tell, what really matters is clean audio signal. Once you cut all the noise from the signal, any decent cable shouldn’t add anything significant.

So, at this point you’re probably impatient to know what monitors I ended up buying. Here were my main candidates, from dozens and dozens I’ve researched:

• Behringer Truth B2031A/B3031A. Supposedly you can find them at 200$-300$, but in Canada I couldn’t find them under 400$. Very accurate and widely loved, apparently a great value for the price, but they also have a reputation of bad build quality, whether that’s warranted or not. If that’s your budget then I doubt you can find better. I was ready to spend a bit more however, and after having two pairs of speakers die on me before, I was very concerned with the bad experiences some had with these.
  
• Adam A7X. This is the one pair I literally couldn’t find a bad opinion about. Everywhere I looked, these speakers were always the ones others were compared to, usually unfavorably. However, I couldn’t find a pair under 900$ in Canada, and going 50% over my budget wasn’t really an option. If you’ve a grand to spend on speakers however, you’d be mad not to consider these.
  
• Yamaha HS80M. These sell 700$ a pair at retail, but I was able to find one at 500$ on ebay, which seems rather common. Much like the Adam A7X, I couldn’t find much else but praise about this one, apart from some finding them overall unimpressive compared to the A7x or other more expensive speakers. These are flat as can be, have 8” woofers, great build quality, look awesome and fit perfectly in my price range. This is what I ended up going for.

I was excited like a child with his Christmas presents when these arrived. They were two separate, huge, heavy boxes. Inside were two huge, heavy, solid, matte black boxes made out of win, with their separate 3-pronged power cables, individual power, volume and high-low cutout controls, ¼” and XLR jacks. You need ample space for these ones.

Then I plugged them in my computer, and BZZZZZZZZZZ OMG WTF NO. As I explained before, I had decided to solve any potential noise or sound quality issue if and when it would manifest itself rather than attempt to prevent it, so I spent a few weeks researching this issue and enduring intolerable noise levels. Let me tell you however, that once this issue was solved (see point 5 above), and I fed these bad boys my best recordings with clean signal, it was pure aural bliss and has been ever since.

One year from then, I haven’t found anything bad to say about these, other that their unforgiving accuracy takes some time getting used to. I just can’t stand listening to music on Youtube anymore, for instance, or to sub-128kbps mp3. I think this is a good thing.

Overall, these are the best 600$ I’ve spent on any computer-related part, and I’d recommend this speaker setup to anyone interested in hearing their recordings as they truly sound like. The next step for me, when I get a real salary that is, is a large hi-definition IPS panel!

P.S.: here's a summary of the pieces I ended up buying for this:
2 Yamaha HS80M monitors
1 Art USB Dual Pre external sound card
1 Olymex USB-ISO isolator dongle
2 cables with 1/4" jacks on each end