I'm being my usual overly harsh, hyperbolic self, of course
But I'm just rather pissed at the state of the whole A/V industry. It used to be that you could walk into a Best Buy or other big box retailer and at least have a number of decent choices for speakers. Never truly awesome choices, of course, but at least some options that were not pure and utter crap.
Klipsch, Polk, Inifinity, Boston, Athena, Energy, Mirage - these were the sorts of brand names that you used to always see and they used to offer quality speakers for reasonable prices.
What happened?
Is the internet to blame? It seems as though the big box stores are just going for more and more super-cheap speakers and HTiB packages while simultaneously positioning those horrid little Bose cubes as the "high end".
If you go to a specialty A/V retailer, they tend to focus more on the more expensive or custom-installer-centric brands. So all of those "in the middle" sort of brands and product lines seem to be disappearing! And that makes me sad
I have to assume that anyone who used to be paying store prices for those brands is simply opting for higher performance from the internet-direct speaker companies. That isn't a bad thing. Far from it! But there are still a TON of people who buy their electronics from physical stores. What are their options now? Crappy HTiB, crappy super-cheap speakers meant to try and compete with those irrationally cheap HTiB packages, or crappy but expensive Bose!
When Klipsch bought API, they sadly sort of became the sole manufacturer for those "inbetween" levels. Sure, polk and Boston are still out there - Boston is probably your best bet at this point. Polk seems to have fallen prey to the same sort of "cut the cost and the quality along with it" business environment that is out there right now.
It's hard to know what to do. You can't cheat physics! The only way to do it is to trick customers with ridiculously effective marketing, the way Bose and Monster manage to continue doing somehow. We all hailed the rise of the internet-direct speaker companies because they offered high-end performance at big box prices. But now, we might have destroyed that market, and actually left ourselves with less choice and fewer options