Years ago, I hand-crafted a really nice pair of three-way speakers, and fine-tuned them in the anechoic chamber at the National Research Council. (Its so nice to work in interesting places!)

You know what I use now? A set of PCWorks speakers from Cambridge Soundworks. It takes the Front and Rear outputs from my SoundBlaster PCI 128, adds a sub-woofer, and blows me away! The real kicker is that it cost about $150 CDN when I bought one for my game-playing brother a year ago, and I bought a used set for myself for $60 CDN this year. My outlay for the hand-crafted, super-flat-response furniture quality [u]pair[/u] of speakers?... about $2000 CDN sob!!