Want to build a home system tailor made for hard dance electronic music - Newbie

IcyNoxx · Aug 19, 2023

Until now I've been pretty much a headphones only listener but since getting into hard dance in the last few months I find that I really enjoy the experience more when the music is coming from actual speakers. However, I know next to nothing about what goes into building a speaker system. What elements do I need? Do you run it through a PC>DAC>Amp as with headphones? I'm in NYC so I'm sure there's some stores here that may have things worth checking out.

I'd say max budget for the entire thing is $5k. It's just for home listening/to practice dancing to - I'm not a DJ or producer or anything. I also live in an apartment building so it's important that it sound good at lower volumes.

I'm eager to avoid making some mistakes I made though when going down the rabbit hole putting together a headphone system: basically at the time the vast majority of the music I listened to was black metal and punk, and I found after spending thousands of dollars that I simply enjoyed low-tier stuff better with those genres - HPs that were going for $150 at time of release I ended up sticking with over ones I bought for $900 and $1500 because the latter simply did not have the proper guitar "bite" in their sound, even if they were superior in every other way. Also, sometimes high tier stuff was simply too revealing in a way that did not work with roughly produced stuff.

All that's to say - I'm not sure where electronic music fits in here vs other kinds of music one would listen to on a speaker system, but I do not want to get a system that has amazing soundstage/details etc. but does not have the raw punch that hard dance benefits from. I also want to be a bit careful because I do not completely know which elements of the hard dance sound I most value since I am only 4 months in at this point (i.e. how a kick hits, whether I'm more concerned about huge bass or aggressive trebly melodies, how I like kicks to sound etc.).

I enjoy pretty much all varieties of hard dance but if I had to pick a couple favorites it would be happy hardcore and hardstyle particularly hardstyle from back around 2009. Here's a few tracks just to spell out the kind of stuff I'm into: