Speaker sensitivity vs SQ


My first thread at AG.

Millercarbon continues to bleat on about the benefits of high sensitivity speakers in not requiring big amplifier watts.
After all, it's true big amplifiers cost big money.  If there were no other factors, he would of course be quite right.

So there must be other factors.  Why don't all speaker manufacturers build exclusively high sensitivity speakers?
In a simple world it ought to be a no-brainer for them to maximise their sales revenue by appealing to a wider market.

But many don't.  And in their specs most are prepared to over-estimate the sensitivity of their speakers, by up to 3-4dB in many cases, in order to encourage purchasers.  Why do they do it?

There must be a problem.  The one that comes to mind is sound quality.  It may be that high sensitivity speakers have inherently poorer sound quality than low sensitivity speakers.  It may be they are more difficult to engineer for high SQ.  There may be aspects of SQ they don't do well.

So what is it please?

128x128clearthinker
Chasing flavors of distortion aka cone breakup or the focused constructive and destructive interference of a horn does not move accurate reproduction forward. Nothing wrong with picking baskin Robbins flavor #426 if that is your thing...

pistonic motion cuts 3db off sensitivity, ain’t no free lunch
Also the box flopping around also adds to output, just not in time with the note played ....
So building a dead box.... cuts output..,,

shall we go on ?

the big baffle can be thought of as a 2D horn ....


Also don’t confuse low sensitivity with a poorly engineered load ( bizarre phase angles, super low impedence, etc... 

or a bunch of series / parallel connections....