[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Good entry level speakers

[Mitch Harding]

I've been a Slim Devices customer for a few years now, and I'm thinking about upgrading from my old, mass-produced Sony home theatre speaker set that I've had for about 8 years.  I moved into a house which has some built-in home theatre speakers that are fine for movies, but I'm not satisfied with them for music.  So my goal is to buy a 2.0 or 2.1 speaker setup to use for music, and use the built-in speakers for movies.  Ideally I'd like to select speakers that could be expanded to a 5.1 (or 7.1) setup in the future, if I move and/or set up the home theatre in a different room.  I know that ideally I'd have different sets of speakers for music and for home theatre, but at some point convenience becomes more important to me.  I guess maybe I shouldn't be posting this to the audiophiles list in that case!

I'm using a Marantz 7500 receiver as an amp right now.  In the future I'm considering getting a dedicated amp just for the music speakers, but for now I'm planning on using the Marantz with the new speaker I buy.  It has a pure direct mode which I've been using for music.  So in my new setup I'd be driving these speakers with the 7500, and the input would pretty much always be Squeezebox playing FLAC (with some 192k+ mp3s mixed in for good measure).

Anyway, I've got a couple of questions:

1) Out of curiosity, does anyone have any idea of the quality of the DAC in the 7500?  I haven't been able to find any info on that, from Marantz or elsewhere.  My comparison tests (between SB2 DAC and Marantz DAC) have not revealed huge differences, but that could easily be due to the quality of speakers that I am using.  Once I have nicer speakers, I'll compare them again.

2) I'm looking for speaker recommendations, either 2.0 or 2.1, with an eye to eventually pairing them with some satellites to become 5.1 or 7.1  My budget for the 2.0/2.1 setup is around $1k.  I know this is a low budget for speakers, but I'm not a golden ear by any means.  Does anyone have any suggestions?  I know one suggestion is to audition speakers, but I haven't found many places around here which have a good selection of speakers.  Once I've settled on a few options, I'll do my best to track them down for an audition.

Thanks in advance!

Mitch

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