The System Builder answers a different question from the rest of this site: given a budget, a channel layout and a seat, what is the loudest complete system the catalogue can actually assemble — and what does the arithmetic that chose it look like?
You give it a budget, a layout from 2.1 up to 7.1.4, and your listening distance. It searches every AV receiver that publishes enough channels to drive that layout, pairs each one with every front pair that fits what is left, fills the remaining roles with the cheapest model that can fill them, and keeps whichever combination reaches the highest peak level at your seat. Then it shows you the terms, in order, ending in the result.
What it does not do
It does not use a budget split. There is no published, defensible source for “spend forty per cent on speakers”, so the tool does not pretend to have one. It spends what the layout forces it to spend and puts the rest where it changes the computed answer.
It does not claim the loudest system is the best one. Level is what published specifications can settle. Nothing here measures distortion, dispersion, or how any of it sounds, and this site has no listening room. When the budget stops buying level, the tool says so plainly rather than inventing a reason to spend the rest.
It does not guess at a missing figure. A front pair whose manufacturer publishes no nominal impedance cannot have its sensitivity put on a common basis, so it is skipped and counted, not assumed to be 8 ohms. Assuming would hand a 4-ohm speaker three decibels it has not earned.
The trap it exists to catch
Manufacturers publish speaker prices both per pair and per unit, and they do not agree with each other about which. A five-channel system needs three pairs and a single centre cabinet, so reading one basis as the other puts a budget out by hundreds of dollars before a single specification has been compared. Every row in the tool’s output states which basis its manufacturer published, and doubles the figure where a role needs two cabinets and the price covers one.
Affiliate links
This is the one tool on the site that carries them, and the reason is in the affiliate disclosure: a builder that names a receiver and then refuses to say where to get it is being precious rather than honest. The disclosure sits above the first link, every link is marked sponsored nofollow, and the picks are made by the arithmetic shown underneath before any link exists. Budgeting uses manufacturer list price only. We do not quote retailer prices, because a price we cannot keep current is worse than no price at all.
Related
- System Headroom Calculator — the same level model, for a pair you already own
- Two speakers, both “87 dB”, three decibels apart — the sensitivity correction this tool applies to every candidate
- AV receivers ranked by main-zone pre-out channels — what happens when a receiver can process a layout but not drive it
- The gear database — every figure used here, with its source
- How we work — the method, and where our models break