Until recently, the home-theater speaker market seemed a calm, beautiful little pond—from nearly any vantage point, you could see all 200-plus speaker makers with their mostly predictable offerings. Products dropped in and out with minor ripples, and...

In the past few years, this pond has been disturbed by a tidal wave not unlike that caused by an elephant's winning entry in a belly-flop contest. Increasingly, the vast pool of labor in the People's Republic of China has been tapped to assemble and...

Until recently, the home-theater speaker market seemed a calm, beautiful little pond--from nearly any vantage point, you could see all 200-plus speaker makers with their mostly predictable offerings. Products dropped in and out with minor ripples, and...