Dynamic compression in speakers themselves?

If you want open sound , do as I did and try open baffle speakers . Spatial Audio M3 Turbo S in my case . High sensitivity, about 95 dB , Pro Audio drivers, 15" pair per side, compression horn from 300Hz on up & affordable factory-direct with a return policy you will not want to use . Better cooling of the voice coils not enclosed in a cabinet . Positioning is non-critical .

I have been experimenting with mechanical damping on both speakers and headphones using sorbothane glued to the front  speaker baffle or various locations on headphones. This can give an amazing increase in dynamics and improvement in timbre.  What is happening here is barely discussed among audiophiles but as best I can tell it is just Newton's third law in operation. For every action there is an opposite reaction which means that the vibrations coming out of the speakers create an opposite set of vibrations in the enclosure. Dampen these out and  you get a striking, almost amazing improvement in sound. About a half dozen headphone makers  are playing around with this, including Sennheiser, Grado and B&W. The last time I Googled "constrained damping" I came up with a similar number of speaker manufacturers. I discuss these issues in greater detail here.  https://www.head-fi.org/threads/damping-mechanical-energy-distortion-of-stax-and-other-phones-with-s...  This damping results in some loss of efficiency.

Other speakers: Legacy Focus is good value and great performance. Large Focal good also but expensive. Paradigm Persona 9H. B&W 800. Pretty much the top of the line in any of these brands will bring you quite close to pro main monitor - you will only miss a few dB dynamic range. Unfortunately, nothing really gets around the physics of a giant box with big woofers - you can’t have small aesthetics without taking a little hit in dynamics.

http://www.ajaudio.co.uk/Loudspeaker%20thermal%20compression.htm   Thermal compression is a term used to describe the effect on a loudspeaker of the voice coil heating up during use.

@johnk

Thermal compression is one problem - affecting small voice coils much more than large ones. Small voice coils are standard for the consumer market because they are so much cheaper and easy to build as tolerances can be as sloppy as you like.

The other form of compression is from non-linear magnetic field. Long small diameter voice coils are cheap and have good sensitivity but the coil is not immersed in an even magnetic field - so harmonic distortion is high and they run out of linearity almost immediately upon any excursion.

I am sure that most folks here dismiss this problem...so I will include a link to a $30,000 lauded speaker that suffers heavily from compression. This is not an attack on Magico as I can do this for almost ALL high end consumer brands...

Look at the Deviation from Linearity plots - oh dear a cavernous hole in tweeter response - this means lots of distortion too as the crossover won’t work effectively as the tweeter impedance changes dramatically. A terrible design but all too common and almost all major high end brands (20,000+) tested by Sounstage show this weakness!!!!

http://www.soundstagenetwork.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1043:nrc-

If anyone challenges me I can post dozens more links all with top speaker brands - all with dismal performance in this area. No wonder live music sounds so much more real and “live” compared to most high end consumer systems. These systems with these deficiencies just sound strained, dull and boomy when asked to produce live dynamic sound.

There is a very small following of folks with giant speakers ( Tannoys etc) that really get this essential aspect of fidelity. And the surprise is that you don’t have to actually listen very loud to hear the difference - just some well recorded dynamic music.