High efficiency speakers vs Low, pros and cons

If you have other speakers that do not reveal the deficiencies of your system, they are also not revealing part of the music. When you reveal all, you also get a more revealing musical experience. Some cannot tolerate this, and seek a more "forgiving" speaker. Each person needs to fill his/her own music needs.

When playing records, the efficient speaker usually shows up more record noise than other types, because it does not mask as much.

Higher efficiency speakers have no edge sonically. Their main benefit being that they are easier to drive, so they are available to be used with a wider range of amplifiers. The less efficient a speaker, the more careful you have to be in mating a amp for best sound. In general, there are good and bad sounding speakers that have high and low efficiencies. So the efficiency rating has nothing to do with sound quality, only amplifier selection really.

An analogy: look at the speaker efficiency rating as you would the miles per gallon rating in a motor vehicle. A vehicle with a MPG rating of 28 is not necessarily a better vehicle than one with a rating of 20. It may not even go further, depending on the size of the gas tank (amp). A higher MPG rating (efficiency) and a large gas tank (amp) will take you farther (max spl), but may or may not be, in comfortable style (sound quality).

I hope this was helpful.

Regards,
John

BTW, they usually save you money on amps. Because you won't need much to drive them, even if you don't go the SET route, you can buy a company's less expensive 60 watt amp, instead of the same company's more expensive 300 watt amp.

You cannot separate the loudspeaker from the amplifier that drives it. There is nothing in either approach (low power/high efficiency vs. high power/low efficiency) that makes one inherently better. Outstanding musical performance can be achieved by both methods.

Please take this with a grain of salt, as these are gross generalizations. High efficiency speakers may be more suceptible to noise infiltration, may have greater impedance swings, and may have looser bass. I repeat, these are gross generalizations.

Speakers that are high efficiency ( 95 - 96 dB's and up ) tend to sound punchier aka "more dynamic". This is even truer for "ultra high efficiency" designs ( 100+ dB's ). Having said that, most of them also tend to be bandwidth limited and lack the ability to handle gobs of power / play at sustained high volume levels. They tend to use inexpensive low mass* drivers that break up and distort if pushed hard. As such, the benefits of high efficiency are only good if used at lower power levels. As Unsound said, these are pretty vague generalizations, but ones that i've come to realize via past experiences. There are exceptions to every rule though and more than one way to skin a cat. Sean
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* the more mass you have in a driver, the harder the motor must work to push it, hence a loss in efficiency.