Old fart with speaker questions, be nice :-)

[cawgijoe]

If you want a speaker that does not require a sub for home theater, go for a new Thiel CS3.7 or a used Thiel CS3.6 or CS6.0.

These speakers are awesome but not cheap.

It's difficult and expensive to design good speakers that go low in the bass and are still very accurate.

The large woofers of the past were often distorted even though they played low.

Most speakers these days are designed with home theater in mind to be used with a subwoofer. There is nothing wrong with that. What you need to do is to make sure that the subwoofer is set up to integrate with the other speakers so they blend seamlessly. This is not always done correctly hence you may have too much or too little bass effect.

There are many speaker manufacturers out there. Best Buy is really not the place to listen to speakers. For the mass-market I would go to Tweeter even though they are not perfect, they seem to have higher qulaity products and more knowledge of them.

If you can, go to a high end audio/video store in your town to audition speakers.