How do you pick a good set of speakers? Or, to put it another way, how do you find speakers you like without visiting every store in your entire area?
Speakers are problematic. No matter what you do, you can't tell how they'll sound in your home. The room is just as important a factor as the equipment, especially the speakers. That ensemble of speakers is the only part of the equipment that actively interacts with the room. You're best off finding a qualified professional, giving them your budget and letting them pick for you.
Sure, you could listen to a bunch and pick out what you like, but even A/B testing speakers right next to each other still puts them in different positions. It's also next to impossible to remember what a speaker sounded like from one store to the next. In any case, the loudest speakers will always sound best until you get them into your environment, set them up properly, and listen for an extended period. You can keep in mind, however, that a speaker that doesn't sound good in the store doesn't sound good. Play something soft with a lot of subtlety and see how that sounds. Again: find a professional you trust and leave it to them.
Some people pore over speaker specs like a treasure map, but what part of the story do they really tell? It depends on whether you mean complete specs or just rated range and sensitivity. A speaker with lousy specs is a lousy speaker, but the response curve you see in magazine articles are like your car's MPG rating. They're taken in anechoic chambers—completely sound deadened with no reflections—and one meter or less from the speaker. You don't sit in the near field and your room isn't anechoic: your milage may vary. Great specs (and this is only if they are not manufacturers' hype) are the limit of what you can get, not the actual performance you will get. Finally, different materials and technologies may show similar specs with entirely different sound characteristics.
What can you do to feel comfortable with making this decision? Get help. This one you can't do on your own. It's risky. Picking speakers is not the same as picking other equipment and there is no way around that. The specs can tell you that a speaker is bad, but not that it is good. For what it's worth, there are certain technologies we trust more than others, but you get what you pay for. However, no matter how much you spend on speakers, they will not sound good if they are not set up properly. And this is not just an issue of aiming them right.
Infinite Sight and Sound does not compete on price. Our focus is performance and service, including the correct audio calibration of your listening area. No one in the DC area is more qualified than we are.