Questions on speakers for home recording?

I will let someone else answer the specifics about types of speakers, but I have always found pawn shops to be great places to purchase equipment like this. You have to make sure they will let you return it if it doesn’t work, but I have a great mixing board, studio speakers, monitors, et al and got most of it through scouring the pawn shops.

Musicians sometimes (often) run out of cash and have to pawn some decent equipment. I have also found pawn shops to be great for tools (chop saw) because carpenters have some of the same issues as musicians with cash flow.

check these two places. musiciansfriend.com and sweetwater.com. “near-field” monitors are worth every extra penny, but you don’t have to get the high end ones to make a difference.

On the other hand, if you’re just messin’ around with a demo recording of your own work, I think a decent pair of bookshelf speakers would suffice.

Good speakers are expensive. If you want hi-fidelity reproduction of the recording signal, at high enough volumes (power levels) to critically hear sonic detail, with good spectral and phase linearity, absence of distortion, good sound field dispersion, etc., you’ll have to spend a lot of money on studio monitors or other audiophile-quality speakers. Your “little crappy computer speakers” are not without merit, however, if your mix only involves things like timing and alignment of tracks.For true mixing of tracks, where you need to finely adjust relative dynamic levels, apply EQ or compression or other effects, etc., you’ll need hi-fidelity transducers—either good speakers or good headphones. The latter are considerably less expensive than the former. Whether you can engineer a recording using headphones alone I don’t know—but I don’t see why not.

This is assuming you care how it sounds when faithfully reproduced. If the intended listeners use little crappy computer speakers as well, then it hardly matters.