I’m On A Budget – Should I Get Tower Speakers?

When every penny counts, you agonize over every purchase. When looking for speakers, there are two main choices: Bookshelf or towers. When you look at systems people post online, they often have tower speakers. But if you are on a budget, should you get tower speakers? Might tower speakers be the best purchase? Let’s discuss!

The Argument

You don’t buy one pound of ground beef while feeding a family. You buy an industrial-sized pack. The per pound price is better. Yes, you are eating beef-related meals for a week, but you saved a ton of cash.

Tower speakers look like the best option when you are on a budget. Not only do you get the treble and the midrange, but you also get the bass. We know what you are really thinking, if you have tower speakers, do you really need a subwoofer? If you follow that link, you’ll know our answer.

Budget Tower Speakers Aren’t What You Think

In most cases, if you were to open up a tower speaker, you’d be surprised by what you find. Those budget towers are often little more than bookshelf speakers with integrated stands. If you are looking at a tower speaker and the binding posts on the back are up high, you can bet that the bottom of that speaker is separated from the top. You could cut off the bottom of that tower speaker and it wouldn’t affect the performance at all.

Quality Over Quantity

When you are working within a budget, you can’t only think of quantity. Sure, you want to make your money stretch as far as possible. In our previous example, you might want to buy a larger quantity of meat as you get a lower price per pound. But you wouldn’t buy expired meat no matter how cheap it was. There is a level of quality that you won’t dip below.

Budget tower speakers often sound worse than bookshelf speakers that cost less. The material cost of the larger cabinet for the tower speaker means that they couldn’t spend as much on the quality of the drivers, crossovers, and tuning. Sure, you might get a little more bass out of a tower speaker, but is that worth overall worse sound? Especially when you are probably going to end up with a subwoofer eventually anyway?

Take Away

If you are on a budget, you should be looking at the best bookshelf speakers you can afford. You will end up with much better-sounding speakers that will stay with your system for years. What is more budget-friendly? Tower speakers that you’ll want to upgrade eventually or bookshelf speakers that you’ll love forever? I think you know the answer!