How close to the real thing?

Weseixas, the term "ear splitting" immediately gives away the game -- what you are referring to here is a system that is overloading, lots of nasty system generated distortion hammering away at your ear drums, of course it sounds terrible! The other giveaway is "effortless power", so to translate:

System A: "alive", with size and effortless power - equals x dB's, by sound meter, with MINIMAL audible distortion.
System B: ear splitting SPL - equals precisely the same x dB's, by sound meter, with SIGNIFICANT levels of EXTREMELY unpleasant distortion injected.

As to an efficient speaker requiring lots of power, not true. Take a 96dB sensitive speaker, which is also an easy 8 ohm load (Klipsch again!), and an amplifier of capable of a clean 120 watts RMS. You get an extra 3dB volume for every doubling of 1 watt power, which means the speaker can produce 96 + (3 * 7) = 117dB at 1 metre. Considering you have two such speakers, then at a couple of metres you will have all the dynamics you need, PROVIDED the system is adding only low levels of distortion. Then, the clean "percussive energy" you speak of will be there in spades ...

Frank

Hello frank,

You should deduct the 6db drop for every 1M from the speaker, since typical listening distance is about 3M that means your 96db would translate to 84db at the listening position with 1 watt, it would take a lot more than 120/ch to reach your goal of 117db and typically you want to have a min of 5 times above the required rms power, sometimes more due to phase shift.

It takes a lot more than what most think to reproduce the percussive energy of live sound (live instruments, not pa band sound) a min of 1K watt and up IMO if you are serious about it. It's not going to happen with 120/ch...

Regards,

"You will be surprised that tremendous SPL is not "ear splitting" when it is clean, undistorted and dynamic."

I have invested a lot of time, effort and money addressing these aspects of good sound in my home system.

My conclusion is that it can be practically achieved but is not likely to happen by chance and does not come cheap.

Hello Shadorne,

I'm not using "ear splitting" as a pejorative and I have heard the studio "monitors" listed and have designed a few myself in the past, sometimes to replace, sometimes to assist those listed, so i'm aware of "loud and clean" and any system producing a continuous Din of over 117 db is ear splitting to me and i will no longer expose myself to such.

A few of those studios would record SPL's in the 138 dB + range(some could shake the console) I can bet a lot of those guys probably don't hear much today... :)

Live instrument grow with a size and power that is unique to there reproduction, to reproduce this growth will require power, lots of it and most if not all speakers will benefit from this power reserve.

Regards,