FREE Shipping in the Contiguous 48 States! Worldwide Shipping!
ABOUT uS
We are Creative Sound Solutions and our mission is to provide the ultimate in sound quality at a price anyone can afford. We do that through a tiered pricing system that allows you to do none, some, or all of the work in building one of our speakers so you get to decide where you spend your money but every option results in identical great sound.
Creative Sound Solutions is operated out of the Southeast Michigan area by two friends with a passion for great audio. Ownership of CSS was transferred from Bob Reimer, the original founder, to us in June 2017 and since then we've been working on bringing back some of the great drivers CSS is known for, as well as introducing some cool new products to make it easier to get a world class speaker at a great price.
Who we are
Why we do it
We started this business for two reasons: high end sound costs too much for the average person and building and designing and building your own from scratch is complicated and intimidating. This leaves the average consumer settling for an inferior quality loudspeaker with low quality parts.
Really great speakers cost too much
Why do really great speakers cost so much money? Because most really great speakers use really great parts, and those parts aren’t cheap. It’s easy to hide cheap parts on the inside of a speaker because most people aren’t willing to risk voiding a warranty or damaging a $2000 pair of speakers. Manufacturers are also typically unlikely to share a lot of the details of what’s going on inside, save for the few instances where it makes them look good.
We have been doing custom crossovers and repairs for commercial speakers for a number of years now and we can tell you that if you look inside almost any sub-$2000 speakers you’ll likely find one or more of the following: woofers with stamped steel or plastic frames (production and material costs), minimal or no copper in any of the drivers (material costs), compromised crossovers with too few and/or low quality parts (material and assembly costs), and thin walls and/or no bracing to save on weight (shipping costs). All of this adds up to a speaker than might be good, but is rarely in our opinion, excellent.
There are two reasons manufacturers do this. First, it’s unlikely that the average person will open up the cabinets to see the insides, and even if they did, the average person might not know what to look for to know whether quality parts are being used. Second, manufacturers have to produce a product at a much lower price than they sell because they are selling through a retail location that they don’t own and often times even have a distributor in the mix. Both want to make a profit so if you are selling a $2000 pair of speakers by the time it gets to retail, the manufacturer is probably selling it for $250 to a distributor, who’s then selling it for $1000 to a retailer. That $250 has to include all of the costs – cabinets, components, packaging, shipping, marketing, production overhead, etc. – that it takes to produce that particular set of speakers, so you quickly see that the actual cost of components tends to be very low.
DIY is hard
We found out long ago you can easily source much higher quality components to use in a speaker. However, buying better quality components and slapping them in a box doesn’t equal great sound either. You still need to know how to integrate those components to make them a seamless and coherent loudspeaker. Learning that skill takes not only a lot of time and patience, but also requires specialized equipment as well as woodworking skills and tools.
Together we have spent over 30 years improving our skills and purchasing newer and better equipment that helps us produce the amazing speakers we currently can. However, we know not everyone has that kind of patience, desire, or money to invest in getting a truly excellent speaker at the prices DIY has to offer, so we decided to start CSS to bridge that gap.
We started by producing or sourcing great drivers that rival those in speakers of ANY price point. The drivers we use are some of the highest quality, lowest distortion on the planet. Next, we spent countless hours designing each speaker with a series of measurements, modeling, and listening sessions to refine the sound. Then we design the cabinets and crossovers for easy assembly. Once finished, we publish all the data online for our customers. This process allows us to offer speakers that can be purchased in various stages of assembly at drastically reduced prices, but still be easy enough to put together that you don’t have to have years of speaker building knowledge to come away with a great speaker. With zero knowledge and 5 minutes on YouTube learning to solder, you can be ready to assemble one of our speakers.
Or buy them finished and still get a fantastic price compared other speakers. We only sell direct and our speakers are built to order so we have drastically minimized our overhead and markups. If we sold through typical retail, our speakers would be at least 50% more expensive in any form.