i was wondering what kind of receiver and speakers you guys have and what makes it better than what i got.
I don't think the receiver is toooo important. I think most of the brands people own - yamaha, ATI, Rotel, Pioneer, Emotiva, Marantz, Denon, Onkyo, NAD, Anthem, Parasound usually do sufficiently well in making quality electronics. I don't particularily trust some brands with receivers - Sony, Sherwood, Philips, Technics, Samsung, and some of the cheaper stuff even from brands like Denon. I'm biased towards Marantz and Hypex but that's not important. What's important is knowing that you've got an amplifier that won't limit your choice in speakers. Some speakers lose sound quality with weaker amplifiers.
So what makes some speakers better than others? I will say that better speakers will be more clean(poor recordings will sound poor,and good recordings will sound a lot better), not have sibilance (overhang/emphasisssss of the the 's' sound), not have chestyness (makes men yelling sound like dogs barking), have tight, controlled bass (not just boomy noises, but stopping and starting like..well.. acoustic music), not give you listening fatigue (where after listening for a while, your ears start to hurt), play louder without making you cringe(less distortion at high SPLs, important for dynamic content in movies and music), give you a real sense of stereo imaging (the ability to place sounds within a recording between the two speakers), and will make instruments and voices sound more like instruments and voices there in the room and less like speakers trying to make familiar sounds. How do I describe that further? I don't.
You have to actively seek out speakers to judge for yourself what the differences are. The differences from what you're coming from, are going to be far from subtle. The best way to describe it is that you'll come to notice that recordings are more complex than they seemed at first. Recordings just seem to have a dimension that was "flattened" with poor speakers, and has now been released. If you took the same recording, and took one FLAC straight out of the CD, and another a 128kb/s mp3, on bad speakers they'll sound the same or similar... On good speakers one will sound like it's trapped and suffocated, and the other will sound more like you would expect it to sound.
Does that mean great speakers should sound special? Not necessarily. Think of a great speaker as being a window. It's there, but you don't want to notice that it's there when you look out of it. You just want to see what's on the other side.
So if the goal of audio as a hobby is to get a system you don't notice, isn't it kind of silly and pointless? Maybe, but once you hear something that "does it more right", you go back to the thing that doesn't do it as right and can't help but notice the things you never noticed before. At that point poor speakers become like a fogged up window, and you're just trying to not notice the fog but you can't help that it's there, and next thing you know you just pulled out your credit card.
I think a receiver is a good place to start upgrading for you because what you're coming from is really lacking. Once you get a good receiver, like a Marantz SR5004 for example, it could last you a long, long time.
