I don't think I have a good enough ear to justify buying thousand dollar speakers. I went with the Presonus E5s and if I paid attention to "reviews" I probably wouldn't have gotten them. 5-inch speakers and to me, they are perfect. Have read numerous times that anything under 8 inches is foolish to buy. But being a kind of stubborn person I decided to give smalller ones a try first.
Very glad I went with these. I don't roll in money, born into working class, parents always liked their drink. I have bought any equipment I've ever had. I had guitar and amp on my xmas list for year's until my ma said if I put it on it again I'll get nothing. Long story short I've had to work with a tight budget for a long time.
To finally be here is just something else. Very grateful
Totally valid. All of it.
The difference between 8" and 5" nearfields isn't night & day. Even on the spec sheets, it's not that big of a difference to the low end, it's mostly in how loud they can play before they start distorting. No nearfields really do good bass, and almost none of the rooms people use them in are capable of doing bass/sub-bass cleanly even if they did.
If I can give one piece of advice about speakers (or almost anything) on a budget....
don't. chase. small. upgrades! All that does is waste money that could be saved for bigger changes or things that matter more.
You've got $300 speakers that are plenty reasonable for that price. $500 speakers aren't going to be life-changing. Neither are $800 speakers. And, there are a lot of other things that will improve the sound more than $1000 speakers.
If you climb that ladder the way a lot of people do using those vague prices as examples, you've essentially spent $2600 for $1000 speakers. If, instead, you just deal with what you have and save the money, and only make the big jump....you can spend the same $2600 in the same amount of time but wind up with $2300 speakers....or even better...$1000 speakers and $1300 in improving the room via some combination of bass traps, room correction, and subwoofers.
Either of those is a better situation than what happens when you chase small, incremental improvements. If you get to the point they're not working for you anymore, then that needs to be addressed. But, I'm very much more a fan of big jumps than little ones. The little ones are a waste of money.
It's a totally different thing and a totally different price bracket, but I'm battling that right now, and my focus is not just guitar sound at home. I've cobbled together an active multi-way system with very nice treatments and a little room correction that all together really sounds fantastic...but it forces me to have a Reaper session running any time I want to make sound, whether it's my FM3 (well, I can just put up other speakers somewhere, but on the main system at least), an album I'm working on, pleasure listening, having news/yt/odyssee on in the background when I'm at my WFH day job, or even listening to vinyl on the good stereo.
OTOH, there are a couple "black box" devices that could replace that Reaper session with lower-latency that do the processing on their own, and involve a (very small) DAC upgrade for the monitor path at the same time and would simplify other parts of my setup. Really, there are 2 that would work the way I want, and one of them is clearly better but costs about twice as much when all is said and done.
So...."cheap out" on already very nice gear and end up spending 50% more in the long run or really stretch as soon as I can get the money together? Neither one is going to send me to the poor house, and the differences between them are significant but not huge.
For me, when it comes to speakers, the choice would be clear....just wait.
But with more high-tech things, with the way things might be changing over the next few years....it's really a much harder choice.
