Yes and no, depending on our definitions of "big" and "affordable." What's our version of big and affordable?
If we say "affordable" is about $500-$1000, all in...
For amplification you can get a factory refurbished Denon or similar 5.1 receiver for under $200. This is what I usually recommend because it will give tremendous flexibility over the long haul and honestly, receivers/amplifiers all sound very similar if not identical.
As far as widely available brands, Sony and Polk sell some nice affordable tower speakers for a few hundred dollars. Those put out enough bass to be fun on their own without a subwoofer, depending on what you're looking for.
I actually tend to not love these quite as much as some of the old 80s style "monkey coffin" speakers but that's probably nostalgia talking. There aren't many of those around any more, affordable or otherwise. The cheapest are the BIC EV-15s, which have ridiculous 15" red woofers, but sound pretty nice and the grill covers do a good job of hiding the red woofers.
There are also a lot of great bookshelf style speakers and Wirecutter does a great job maintaining a leaderboard of sorts. Compared to what most people want these days, maybe these are considered "big." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bookshelf-sp...
So...
You can have a nice, simple 2-channel stereo system with a receiver and two tower speakers for as little as $500. It will sound great with nearly zero complexity and you can stop there. That is enough to be happy until the end of your days!
You can substitute bookshelves for towers, but practically speaking you'll probably need to buy speaker stands as well and at that point you've spent as much as towers would have cost.
If you're willing to spend a little more and add a subwoofer or two and tolerate more complexity, you can have something extremely good and full-range for $500-$1000 total.
There are options such as DIY that can deliver much greater price/performance, and are a lot of fun if you're into that and don't mind buying up half of the wood clamps at your local Harbor Freight. Very roughly speaking the DIY flat pack kits will give you about 2-3x the price/performance of commercial speakers.
This is great advice, thanks. :) The DIY route is immediately tempting, and I have a wood shop so I'm not afraid of hacking problems away in a medium-density fiberboard fashion, but I am looking to avoid new projects!
I hear you on the bookshelf speakers. My desk speakers are a couple of Edifier S1000DB's (cheap Mackie CR3's before that) and for work stuff that's fine. I never thought about sticking them anywhere else, but that might be enough; my living room is small.
Definitely some stuff to chew on. Thank you again!
Happy to help. Good luck to you! It's a fun hobby, potentially a rabbit hole, but also a fun rabbit hole... and also it doesn't need to be a rabbit hole at all.
If you decide to look into the DIY route, PartsExpress and DIYSoundGroup are two of the most popular sources for affordable flat-pack kits.
If we say "affordable" is about $500-$1000, all in...
For amplification you can get a factory refurbished Denon or similar 5.1 receiver for under $200. This is what I usually recommend because it will give tremendous flexibility over the long haul and honestly, receivers/amplifiers all sound very similar if not identical.
As far as widely available brands, Sony and Polk sell some nice affordable tower speakers for a few hundred dollars. Those put out enough bass to be fun on their own without a subwoofer, depending on what you're looking for.
I actually tend to not love these quite as much as some of the old 80s style "monkey coffin" speakers but that's probably nostalgia talking. There aren't many of those around any more, affordable or otherwise. The cheapest are the BIC EV-15s, which have ridiculous 15" red woofers, but sound pretty nice and the grill covers do a good job of hiding the red woofers.
There are also a lot of great bookshelf style speakers and Wirecutter does a great job maintaining a leaderboard of sorts. Compared to what most people want these days, maybe these are considered "big." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bookshelf-sp...
So...
You can have a nice, simple 2-channel stereo system with a receiver and two tower speakers for as little as $500. It will sound great with nearly zero complexity and you can stop there. That is enough to be happy until the end of your days!
You can substitute bookshelves for towers, but practically speaking you'll probably need to buy speaker stands as well and at that point you've spent as much as towers would have cost.
If you're willing to spend a little more and add a subwoofer or two and tolerate more complexity, you can have something extremely good and full-range for $500-$1000 total.
There are options such as DIY that can deliver much greater price/performance, and are a lot of fun if you're into that and don't mind buying up half of the wood clamps at your local Harbor Freight. Very roughly speaking the DIY flat pack kits will give you about 2-3x the price/performance of commercial speakers.