If you love music the likelihood is that want it to sound as good as it possibly can. Investing in a good quality pair of floor standing speakers is essential in getting the best out of the other components of your system.

High quality floor standing speakers do not come cheap and will require some serious financial commitment from you. Having said that though your speakers are likely to last 20 years or more, if you compare that to your amplifier or CD player, you can see what the majority of your hi-fi system budget should be spent on speakers. They will last a long time.

Although electronic technology moves on at a very quick pace, speaker technology hasn’t really moved on very much at all in the past 20 years or so. Sure, you can get smaller speakers that work in harmony with a sub and there are new materials that cones are made out of such as aluminum and Kevlar, but fundamentally the technology is the same. The speaker needs to move air at a certain frequency for you to hear it. So a good pair of speakers bought 20 years ago, providing they have been looked after and not stores in a damp place will still sound as good today.

Buying a new pair of floor standing speakers can be a difficult decision. Not only will they cost you a lot of money, but they must also fit in to your home surroundings. Averaging at about 3ft high they are not small pieces of kit and the look of them will more than likely influence you as much as the cost and sound of them.

Speakers now come in a large variety of colors, surprisingly there are still a large proportion of black speakers about, but there are many available in various natural wood finishes, oak, cherry and beech being the most popular.
 

• Cones (or drivers as they are sometimes known)
  A good set of floor standers will have at least two cones – one cone to handle the high frequencies (the tweeter) and a larger cone that will handle the mid and bass range frequencies. Some will have three cones – a tweeter, mid size cone and large cone – which will correspond to the three frequency ranges, high, mid and low respectively.
• A Baffle
  This is the cabinet in which the cones / drivers are mounted.
• A bass port.
  This is the hole that you see in the cabinet. The size and shape of it is matched to the size of the cabinet and cones to give you optimal performance. Some only have bass ports on the front and some only on the back, some have both front and back bass ports.
• Speaker connections.
  If you are spending a considerable amount on your speakers do make sure that you get a set that has four sets of terminals on the back of your speakers. This will allow you to bi wire them. Getting speakers with a bi-wire capability means that at a latter date if you wanted to you could drive the high range and low range cones with independent amplifiers. This means that you miss out the cross over circuit in the speakers and it is handled by exterior components. Bi wiring with independent amplifiers will get the best out of your speakers by improving the control of the frequencies, and the scale and dynamics of the sound.
• You can also benefit from bi-wiring by using a normal stereo amplifier. By using four core cable you will get a much tighter and clearer sound.
• Magnetic Shielding
  If you think you will be positioning your speakers near other electronic equipement, then make sure that the magnetic coil in the drivers is shielded. An unshielded set of speakers will distort the image of a TV if placed too closely to them.
• Spikes.
  Not all, but some speakers come with spikes on the bottom of them. The idea of this is to make the speaker cabinet completely independent of the surface it is sat on. This means that what you are hearing is purely the sound generated by the speaker.
  

• Watts
  The power that a loudspeaker can handles is quoted in watts, this number has no association with the power of the amplifier needed to drive it. However if you used a low power amplifier say 10watts with a 100 watt speakers if you wanted to play your music loudly then the amp would run out of current and the sound would get distorted. As a word of warning it is usually low powered amp distortion that blows speaker cones!
  

• Ohms
  Most speakers have a resistance of 8 ohms and most amplifiers will work with speakers between 4 – 8 Ohms. Make sure you check before buying.
  

Hopefully this article has given you some guidance as to what to look for when buying a set of floor standing speakers.