Finally going to have my own garage to play around in and im trying to plan out a good (yet budget friendly) audio setup. I'm a huge metal head so having loud,bass heavy music come out clear is at the top of the list. Having Bluetooth is a close second on top priorities.
What is everyone on hear using?
Max budget: $200 (lower is better because any money saved can go into making the cars faster)
Unpopular option: I use an ultimate ears bluetooth speaker hung on the cabinet pull of my garage cabinets or garage door track. bonus is that its portable, and in my experience even a cheap speaker hung high up in a room improves the perceived quality of the sound. You can also link several of the UE speakers together for multiple sources of sound.
if that sounds too easy, i'd check at the goodwill store and pawn shops for a cheap older receiver and speakers within your budget. not many people buy new home threater stereos these days, most people just use a soundbar.
I have a jvc head unit, four channel. Run to some aiwa bookshelf speakers from the side of the road for standard low volume listening. For high volume, high quality, i push the button to kick in the other two channels hooked to my advents.
The media source is an alexa dot through a 3.5 mm jack.
E36 M3ty boss head unit attached to an old PC power supply and some speakers from the side of the road.
Total cost to be ~$40. Not the bassiest by a long shot, but loud enough to hear over air tools.
Don't get the E36 M3ty Boss head unit if it gets cold, damn thing doesn't work below 40F, no idea how anyone could put one in their car.
I plan to load my old rack component system into the garage and hang the speakers. Trying to decide if I buy another nice looking cabinet to match what I have and keep the dust out of it.
I use my phone/Bluetooth speaker, my phone or a little portable radio.
Fitzauto said:Finally going to have my own garage to play around in and im trying to plan out a good (yet budget friendly) audio setup. I'm a huge metal head so having loud,bass heavy music come out clear is at the top of the list. Having Bluetooth is a close second on top priorities.
What is everyone on hear using?
Max budget: $200 (lower is better because any money saved can go into making the cars faster)
iHip Stamina bluetooth headphones. They double as earmuffs. Think I paid $16 shipped.
Metal sounds really good on them.
Has anyone in the history of ever actually spent money for a garage system?
I thought the garage sound system was the setup / boombox / whatever you had left in the basement from your late teens, hopefully with speakers that aren't totally blown.
There used to be a pretty cool used gear shop at NW 50th and Portland, I think it has moved down to the shopping center at NW 50th and MacArthur?
I'd start there and check out some pawn shops.
I, too, had my childhood boombox in the garage for several years until I inherited a similar aged Realistic brand receiver that is powering some hand me down speakers- Marantz, perhaps. System is all up on top of a cabinet above the workbench about 7 feet up. Sounds pretty good for what it is.
Probably search craigslist for used equipment for pretty cheap.
I would probably be inclined to buy something like this and use the Spotify playlists on my phone.
Goodwill, thrift store or yard sales. Anything with a 3.5 jack and you are good to go.
In reply to z31maniac :
Check out Goodwill and garage/estate sales. $100 will buy you everything you need.
$20 receiver from the 80s and some $15 yard sale 15" speakers. That's what I did. Big, ported enclosures make sweet booms.
If you're going to spend money, spend it on the speakers. For garage acoustics, the finer points of receiver electronics will be totally lost, and you can't really place speakers in ideal spots without occupying valuable space.
Buy cheap receiver, buy cheap speakers and stuff them in the rafters.
All of the above are great suggestions. BUT! What are you going to ue for lights? I found that when I put up the Barrina lights ( i have 12 of them in my 24x30 shop) the radio, receiver stopped receiving. I have a cheap under cabinet kitchen type of radio plus I have an older Samsung (1975 ish) receiver with 6 old school speakers.
I keep ripped music on an old desktop computer that I use to look up stuff in the garage. I hung an old 3 way set of computer speakers from the rafters.
I have close neighbors so I can't really crank it much. I'm an ex-audiophile. It works for me.
I moved my Sony receiver out to the garage when I upgraded my home theater system many years ago. It has some small KLH speakers at the moment. I just bought a new Klipsch sub (the volume on it goes to 11!), so I may move my old Sony sub to the garage so my neighbors can hear the bass better. 
I need to find a way to play music from my computer (in my office upstairs) on the garage system. I'll probably do something with Bluetooth.
I bought an HP All-in-One (Touchsmart) PC from Goodwill, put a decent drive in it, reloaded Windows and mounted it to the wall in the garage.
It has decent audio and I can load it up with music or movies or just stream things via WiFi.
I think I spent maybe $100 on it and since its touchscreen, I don't need a keyboard or mouse.
Pioneer receiver of unknown provenance, $free from trash
Speakers: 15" drivers in homemade cabinets. Built the cabinets when I was in high school. I used some sort of crude DOS-based program to calculate the volumes and port length. The idea behind the trapezoidal shape was my own, to prevent standing waves.
Drivers are 15" Radio Shack (Realistic?) from the mid-90's. Still sound great. The little black rectangles house a horn tweeter and a soft-dome midrange, and a 3-way passive crossover. All Radio Shack stuff from the mid-90's.
It plays loud, but also clear. I think back when I built the speaker setup it cost me around 3 or $400 for all the materials, which must have been a stinkload of money for my minimum-wage-earning self. But, they've held up for 25 years now.
As for lights, I put up a bunch of those flat panel LEDs, I believe they are Corelco 4k units. I have had issues with LEDs interfering with FM reception (which I listen to a lot) but these LED panels play super nice with the ancient Pioneer, even plugged into the same outlet.
Reception in my garage sucks and I really only listen to my classical music station. Streaming and BT speakers are annoying to me. I have bought a couple of BT speakers and the sound quality was terrible even by my meager standards.
My main stereo has two sets of speaker outputs and "A" and "B" switches to choose between them. So I'm just going to run a set of speaker cables through the ceiling of my basement, pop out a hole in the garage wall and up to a pair of speakers on a shelf.
Of course, this only works it you have an attached garage and a relatively small house like I do so the cable run is maybe 25 feet...
I keep an eye on Woot.com
Found some decent Phillips bluetooth enabled speakers for $20, normal price was $80-90
Here's what is on there now that is under budget, doesn't really match what you're looking for though.
In the small (currently only) garage, I use a Sonos unit, which makes sense because we have them in the rest of the house, so everything is alredy set up for reading music off the drive plugged into the router (NAS), Spotify, Bandcamp, etc... We also have a small bluetooth speaker that's handy for when I'm not *in* the garage, and one of my favorite bits, a pair of 3M Worktunes, so I get better sounds than "muffled grinding" while doing noisy things. Tedious grinding/banging episodes are way better as musical montages.
Reminds me I need to do something about my situation. I had a Marantz model 2220 receiver, circa 1974, doing garage duty. It was pretty scratchy, but okay until I pulled it out for a party last summer. It works no more. I have several pairs of junk speakers out there, but I do need to find another receiver.
I put an old TV in the garage and loop top gear, roadkill, youtube on it.
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