How important is the efficiency of a speaker to you?

In my experience low sensitivity speakers not just make unpleasant compression but also mask microdynamics and texture. It is so obvious that producing low sensitivity drivers is much cheaper. Weak magnets are cheaper, heavier diaphragms are cheaper, rubber suspension are cheaper. But you pay for marketing, and a beautiful box that was lacquered dozens of times.

Dear @alexberger  : Yes you are rigth and I can see your Altec Lansing drivers, that  EMT, the Tamura and the like. Congratulations.

R. 

Again: efficiency is just ONE aspect out of many that has to be addressed in high performance loudspeaker design.  High performance drive units are so much more complicated than "how loud they are", with so many more aspects to them than efficiency alone.  Would you judge a car's track performance on miles per gallon?   

For an alternative dicussion about drivers from a man who is highly respected everywhere in the world for driver design, try this.  Billy explains much better than I:

.ATCWhitepaper.pdf (transaudiogroup.com)  .   

Brad

@atmasphere wrote:

... you’ll find, if you look, that most producers of higher efficiency speakers tend to use tube amps.

Being few of these designs are vintage, or so I suspect, it hardly reflects a strict need for a particular driver-amp type adherence. My guess is many like for horn-based designs to be "toned down" a bit (tubes generally would seem to do just that) so to likely please a former habitual exposition to less dynamically/transiently capable direct radiating and lower efficiency designs. As you no doubt know, listening to a high eff. compression driver/horn combo, not least large format iterations, is quite another animal compared to a dome tweeter and 4-6" coned midrange/woofer; the sheer energy and unforced presence the former is capable of (which is usually felt even at low to moderate SPL’s) can be an overwhelming experience to the "uninitiated," which isn’t to say it’s unnatural sounding - quite to the contrary, to my mind. I find a great horn-based system is simply relaxed, full sounding and dynamically uninhibited. Once you tap into these traits smaller and less efficient designs simply sound malnourished and restricted by comparison.

At any rate the kind of amp used has nothing to do with the phenomena of thermal compression.

Agreed.

My speakers were designed for amps of higher output impedance, but owing to level controls for the mids and highs (which are there even on vintage designs to allow the speaker to be adjusted to the Voltage response of the amplifier) they work fine with my class D amps.

This. My setup context is having the most elaborate "tone controls" at my disposal, i.e.: a digital crossover, which is configurable from the listening position on the fly. Even so - and knowing the sound of my amps over other, passive speakers - nothing indicates any compensation is needed to counterbalance a bright-ish character. What's more: my speakers, despite their design having a few years on its back, is more pro-sector (cinema) than vintage, and so are likely more compatible with SS amps. 

What are you trying say here? If we didn’t have ears, its unlikely that we would be playing around with audio equipment :)

(your reply to below quote)

"Offering technical insight it must also come to acknowledge that what is advocated here can as well be counteracted perceptively, if nothing else by the myriad intricacies of a context"

I merely implied that context is paramount, and moreover suggested that what you advocate design-wise could as well end up being refuted (i.e.: the ears being the most important and last "judge" of things), not necessarily to say some people wouldn’t like the sound of your amps, but that they may prefer a speaker-amp combo that goes contrary to what you recommend :)

@lonemountain wrote:

Again: efficiency is just ONE aspect out of many that has to be addressed in high performance loudspeaker design.

But who's claiming high efficiency is the only or single most important parameter worth pursuing to best achieve earlier named sonic attributes? From my chair it seems high efficiency is struggling to be recognized as a worthwhile factor at all; those of use trying to break through with the importance of high efficiency (which, it goes without saying, isn't implying that other parameters aren't important) are oftentimes met the default response that it simply isn't, which in some cases borders on being willfully ignorant, if you ask me. 

Moreover, the claim that high efficiency is necessarily and always bound to be attained "with a price," sonically speaking, is a fallacy. Typically it comes down to (the need for) large size and a different speaker principle (i.e.: horns), and these aren't deficits in themselves but merely what's required of a high efficiency design (what some may regard as a "scruffy" looking woofer for a front loaded horn sub or mid bass is actually the proper driver for the purpose with its lighter cone and all, and moreover the horn reduces or even eradicates mechanical noise and acts as a low pass filter). What rubs many the wrong way however is large size, and this is the real price to pay.