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Higher Efficiency Speakers

I am going to start my quest for speakers. My room is 13.5x13.5 but open on two sides... so not an ideal space. But never the less this is what I have to deal with.  I have a set of Vandersteen 2ce Sig ii but would like to upgrade. Was thinking about something horn. But seems when you go that route it gets way out of my price range.  Thought maybe look around for some Used Vandersteen Quattro CT but budget starts to stretch at that point. Like to stay under $10,000. What would be good speakers to look for to demo? If my room was alittle bigger.  I’d almost go the other way, and look at Small Maggie’s and Monostrap my amps.
System
Atma-sphere M60
Atma-sphere UV-1 ( Probably the most Modded. Will be at the end of the month. Lol) 
Bel Canto Dac

128x128pstores
mzkmxcv
777 posts
 
Unless the speakers are up against the wall and your seating against the opposite wall (not ideal, both your seating and the speakers should be at least 2ft off the walls, use a sofa table or something to take up space if you want). 
 
Ideally wattage should double with the halting of impedance, so even though your amp is 60W into 8ohm, it is 45W into 4ohm (unless this is a typo), meaning if you use a 4ohm speaker, you are efficiently feeing it <25W if it were an 8ohm speaker. 
 
At 10ft away and wanting 100dB peaks, you would need 91dB or higher efficency. 
 
The Noesis 215RT would be excellent at <$7500 shipped, not sure if the looks are for you though. 
 
Salk also custom makes speakers, so you could go that route, it would just take a long time as they would have to find the suitable drivers, test that it would work well, fine tune it, etc.
wolf_garcia
6,694 posts
 
Klipsch Heresy IIIs...a steal at around 1500 bucks new (look around), not sure anything comes close...built like a tank, unique slanted fat little things that sound beautiful, and 99db efficiency works with anything.
menosavy
20 posts
 
Owning a pair of Salk Song 3 BeAT's that are driven by a Primaluna Dialogue HP integrated,  in a similar sized room, I can attest they sound marvelous and are plenty efficient.

However, pstores specifically was looking at horns below 10k being driven by a less powerful tube amp. That is why I suggested the Spatial X2, however they are not true horn with the AMT driver, but these open baffle speakers are and within budget

Pure Audio Project Trio 15 Horn 1
$8k
96 db 

https://www.pureaudioproject.com/trio15-horn-open-baffle-speakers/
freesole
159 posts
 
@firstnot none of those speakers are what most would call, efficient speakers. 
audiokinesis
2,735 posts
 

Thank you for the recommendation, @ohlala .

I really like Ralph’s amps and pre-amps (I have an UltraViolet too), so just about all of my speaker designs have his amps in mind. Specifically I usually shoot for compatibility with the S-30, on the theory that if a speaker works well with the S-30 and with solid state, it’ll work well with everything in between (which would include the M-60). Which is another way of saying that I pay a lot of attention to the impedance curve, and make it possible to adjust low-end tuning to take amplifier output impedance into account.

Given that your room is open on two sides, imo we’d want a radiation pattern that has relatively little room interaction, at least from early sidewall reflections. Assuming one of those openings is on a side wall, you’ll have zero reflections from that side but a normal amount of early reflections from the other side wall, and the imbalance can skew the imaging. But if the speakers have a fairly narrow radiation pattern to begin with, along with strong toe-in, we can minimize the early sidewall reflections off of that one wall and therefore reduce the discrepancy.

Two of the walls having big openings implies that we may need a lot of bass energy, as those two big openings may act like very effective bass traps. Or they may not. Anyway imo a fair amount of adjustability in the bottom couple of octaves is probably desirable.

Finally those big openings mean that the music will flow into the adjoining rooms, and it might be nice if it sounded good in those adjoining rooms as well. This implies that we want the radiation pattern to be fairly uniform so that the reverberant field has a natural-sounding tonal balance. This is something a good horn system does well, resulting in good sound "in the next room", where we have no line-of-sight to the speakers so all we can hear is reverberant sound.

Ohlala mentioned that my designs can have some of the characteristics of dipoles.  I was a SoundLab dealer for many years.  I like the natural timbre and deep, enveloping soundstage you get from good dipoles positioned far enough out into the room, but such positioning isn't always practical.   So I have a technique for achieving that sort of presentation which does not require the speakers be pulled way out into the room. 

Obviously my biases are showing through in this post, so take it with as many grains of salt as needed, and best of luck to you in your quest.

Duke

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