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Thoughts on Inefficient Speakers.....


SWL

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I like real BIG commercial horns and drivers, which are designed to PRODUCE live music (PA) and still be used at home with superior results.

You guys with these big *** speakers in your houses are my heroes. Yes

I plan on going that route someday........Big Smile

Yeah but I would imagine those poor rock recordings are a little scary.

Great recordings are probably awesome but so much of the music we love is actually recorded like crap.

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The only thing I use the sensitivity spec for is to determine what kind of amplifier I need.

As far as picking speakers....what matters more to me is the Distortion vs SPL. While I don't believe there is direct causation, PWK has shown that there are some trends between efficiency and distortion - especially when talking louder SPL's.

All that to say, there are some low sensitivity speakers that sound great. However, I don't think I'll ever find myself owning anything like that...

Also, there are speakers out there with a low sensitivity that happen to be relatively high efficiency....like electrostatics.

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I love the way my Energy speakers disappear into the sound stage when set-up and fed properly. That's a quality I've never been able to duplicate with horns, although the LS2 does a much better job in this regard than any other horn speaker I've used.

Funny, I have the opposite experience with horns. The Heresy II, La Scala and Klipschorn all completely disapear and I have never been able to do that with regular speakers.

Yeah, that is funny...no explanation from me...cuz I don't have one! It just always seemed to me that the narrower the dispersion of a given speaker, the more localizable as a sound source it was - the less it disappeared into the acoustic.
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They seem to make poorer quality sources sound a little better

That is part of the reason for my interest in less efficient speakers. We all know......all too well.....how poor recordings sound on our ultra-efficient Klipsch speakers.

But great recordings won't sound as good as a highly effecient and low distortion system. Personally I wouldn't mind a pair of new Quad ESL's as far as low eff. I think they do some things right. Walker was a very interesting audio pioneer. However I'd rather have some Tannoy Westminsters or Jubilees with TADs.

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All low efficiency loudspeakers share one trait - they do not sound real, no matter how much power you put into them. The best high efficiency designs seem to have a lifelike presentation that is addictive.

In The Dope From Hope, Vol. 14, No.1, April 1974, PWK writes about this subject and proposes a low efficiency "Ultimate LSH" design that would take 1200 watts to achieve a 100 dB SPL. Note that this is without headroom, so dynamics would be clipped if this were an average level. !00 dB peaks would translate to 85 dB average SPL. My computer speakers will do better than that.

That's a pretty sweeping statement; got any facts or experience to back that up?

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You say, "hyperbole", he says "oxymoron"--low efficiency and good sound are not to be used in the same sentence.

The middle-ground argument might say this: "Separate concerns: if you only play a two-channel at low levels, you may not be able hear the difference".

Additionally as one gets older, one's hearing degrades...and makes distinguishing good from better more difficult

By the way, I think that the quote about PWK is correctly attributed - I believe he said: "higher efficiency = lower distortion", and if that's true then "lower efficiency = higher distortion". Causality is implied in Mr. Klipsch's statement, but..the story doesn't end there...

I've found that many people actually get used to listening to distortion and they actually look forward to it (i would hazard a guess that this is probably due to years of listening to it as youngsters, when it was cool). This is particularly true of "lf" (bass) - I've found that people usually listen to a lot of bass distortion in their subs when watching movies, and it helps them to "hear it" (i.e., the second harmonic). Maybe that's why horn-loaded subs haven't taken the market more than they have thus far, all other things being equal. Same thing for the pops-and-ticks (and other interesting phenomena) of phonograph records. Some people tend to stay with "what brung 'em" a bit longer than others.

"I say 'potatoe'...you say 'tomatoe'"[{] [}]

Chris [;)]

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All low efficiency loudspeakers share one trait - they do not sound real, no matter how much power you put into them. The best high efficiency designs seem to have a lifelike presentation that is addictive.

In The Dope From Hope, Vol. 14, No.1, April 1974, PWK writes about this subject and proposes a low efficiency "Ultimate LSH" design that would take 1200 watts to achieve a 100 dB SPL. Note that this is without headroom, so dynamics would be clipped if this were an average level. !00 dB peaks would translate to 85 dB average SPL. My computer speakers will do better than that.

That's a pretty sweeping statement; got any facts or experience to back that up?

PWK wrote in The Dope From Hope, Vol.14, No. 2 - May 1974, that 115 dB is the peak SPL at a live symphony concert. This SPL may be achieved with his high effeciency speakers in a 4000 cu. ft. room at the listening position with 20 WPC peak, 10 WPC average. Speakers with an 85 dB/W/M sensitivity would require 100 times more power, or in excess of 1000 WPC average power.

If one put 1 KW into such a speaker it would likely blow... sooner or later, probably sooner. Thus a low efficiency design is incapable of reproducing the transient peaks necessary to recreate the dynamic range of the performance. If the speaker could withstand that power, then power compression would not allow 115 dB acoustic output - the output would be more like 110 dB - therefore distorting the waveform.

Additionally, the wiring in a typical residence could not supply sufficient current for such an amplifier without tripping the circuit breaker.

If one wanted to approximate a live rock show the high efficiency design could possibly do that, the 85 dB speaker absolutely could not.

Nothing has changed in this regard since 1974 and the experience I have whenever I play my system confirms these facts.

None of the above applies if you only want background music. But a $50 boom box is plenty good enough for that.

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They seem to make poorer quality sources sound a little better

That is part of the reason for my interest in less efficient speakers. We all know......all too well.....how poor recordings sound on our ultra-efficient Klipsch speakers.

But great recordings won't sound as good as a highly effecient and low distortion system

True.
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They seem to make poorer quality sources sound a little better

That's not my experience at all, for me it's the other way around. My main system (and other systems I've had along the way) is much more critical than my other Klipsch systems so I can only play the very best recordings because it exposes the flaws, maybe too much. I think I might agree with low to mid priced systems but not for the top inefficient systems. When you are talking about the very best loudspeakers I don't think you can say they will make a bad recording sound better, they all expose poor recordings no mater what type of system it is.

Thanx, Russ

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I am still rather partial to my JBL 4311s, and they aren't even really near the best of the JBLs. Still, at 89db, they were far more efficient than anything else I had ever owned, and a lot of albums were mixed on that model.

We have become snobs, and not necessarily for the right reasons.

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power compression is the enemy. a less effecient motor creates heat which makes it more inefficient at producing transients in music. That's the deal about efficient horn design, the driver doens't have to work hard so distortion is kept minimal and the dynamic range of music is delivered as it was meant to be heard.

And I still love my 'bad' recordings- it's about the music to me, not the perfection of the recording process. Recording snobbery would have us listening to nothing but Steely Dan, Diana Krall, and artists of that ilk. Sometimes I like my music cheap and with scars.

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Recording snobbery would have us listening to nothing but Steely Dan, Diana Krall, and artists of that ilk.


And then where would the garage bands be? Remember, 96 Tears was recorded for $50 in a studio with egg cartons stapled to the wall for room treatment.

? & the Mysterians - 96 Tears:


That was recorded in 1998, so the band looks more than three decades older than they did when the song came out.

Vintage version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkvK638yKuY&feature=fvwe2
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power compression is the enemy. a less effecient motor creates heat which makes it more inefficient at producing transients in music. That's the deal about efficient horn design, the driver doens't have to work hard so distortion is kept minimal and the dynamic range of music is delivered as it was meant to be heard.

And I still love my 'bad' recordings- it's about the music to me, not the perfection of the recording process. Recording snobbery would have us listening to nothing but Steely Dan, Diana Krall, and artists of that ilk. Sometimes I like my music cheap and with scars.

Hey, whats wrong with Steely Dan?

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power compression is the enemy. a less effecient motor creates heat which makes it more inefficient at producing transients in music. That's the deal about efficient horn design, the driver doens't have to work hard so distortion is kept minimal and the dynamic range of music is delivered as it was meant to be heard.

And I still love my 'bad' recordings- it's about the music to me, not the perfection of the recording process. Recording snobbery would have us listening to nothing but Steely Dan, Diana Krall, and artists of that ilk. Sometimes I like my music cheap and with scars.

Michael, you nailed it, bud. You are firing on all cylinders today. But I still do like Steely Dan and Diana Krall as reverence standards for pop and jazz. FYI, I just got Ted Nugent's first solo CD and Montrose. Seeger used to play my high school. Seen Ted and Montrose when they first started in the biz. God, love and Rock and Roll!!

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