Floorstanding Speakers

Choosing the Right Floorstanding Speakers

Floorstanding speakers look good and produce high-quality sound for the ultimate in home entertainment. Designed to position next to TV cabinets and bookcases, they take advantage of this rarely used vertical space while using up very little floor space. You can even use the speakers as rear speakers of your home theater system.

What's a Floorstanding Speaker?

Floor speakers typically feature a good overall frequency range, thanks to the incorporation of several different driver types. The tweeter drivers are usually the top-most drivers on tower speakers, emitting high-pitched sounds ranging from 2,000 to 30,000Hz. This high-frequency detail provides focused, precise sound that's big on sensitivity but low on distortion. Midrange drivers handle sounds ranging from 500 to 2,000Hz, which is perfect for adding acoustic energy into the sound produced by the speakers.

Woofers produce low-frequency sounds of about 40 to 1,000Hz, filling your living room with high-quality bass response. Subwoofers magnify the bass sounds with a frequency range of 20 to 200Hz. Floorstanding speakers are larger than bookshelf speakers, and while floor speakers can have several woofers on top of midrange and tweeter drivers, bookshelf speakers can only handle a single tweeter and midrange driver. You may want to consider connecting your floor speakers to your center channel speakers for theater-like audio quality.

Finding the Right Floorstanding Speakers

The human ear can perceive sound frequency of 20 to 20,000Hz, hence, the frequency range of speakers should fall within this range. Also, consider the impedance of speakers, which measures the current resistance, which impacts how much load the devices can handle from the amplifiers in ohms. It's important to match speaker impedance to that of an amplifier. The sensitivity (measured in decibels) measures how efficiently speakers can convert power into sound. The higher the sensitivity rating, the greater the efficiency.