High Efficiency Speakers Your top 3 or more

I'll check them out. Thanks!

Mmike84, having long ago auditioned the AudioNote SEs and having heard them sound wonderful in Peter Qvortrup's home earlier, especially in conveying the emotions of the music, I must say there is a major issue of setting them up properly. At shows, where Peter sets them up, they are always in the room corners and substantially toed in. In Peter's listening room they were not so carefully placed and not in the corners. In my room they were away from the rear wall and side walls, and I could not get anywhere near with the sounds I had previously heard.

At the last THE Show, the Audio Federation room did not sound very good until the last days and Peter's alignment.

Mapman, driving a speaker with a class D amp does not mean that you get the liveliness and emotive capability that high-efficiency speakers seem to bring. The point of HE is more than just drivability. And, while in general ICE, Tripath, and other chip amps are VERY good for the money they are still missing some of what SETs do. IME.

Most high efficiency speakers have fairly tight tolerances in the voice coil gap which makes them very reactive. The back EMF they present to amplifiers that use a lot of feedback is enough to confound the amplifier, as the feedback signal thus contains induced errors.

This is why transistors in general tend to sound shrill on horns and why horns had such a difficult road back into high end audio in the last 20 years- the bad rap of a bad combination.

However if not so much a tube/transistor thing as it is the amount of feedback used by the amplifier. Transistors do tend to use a lot more than tubes, and there are tube amps that don't use any. There are some transistor amps that don't any feedback also and not surprisingly they don't do so bad on horns.

I heard the new field-coil Shindo speaker at THE Show. It seemed to have some potential (no pun intended) but was clearly not playing the bass that you would expect out of a driver and cabinet that large. The material I played has information in the mid-20s, and my suspicion is that the Ongaku amplifiers that were being asked to play the bottom end were simply not up to the task, but its only a suspicion. When hearing any system there is always the tendency to place the blame of shortcomings where your biases lie... regardless, I think that the speaker they showed is really something to watch.

I'd really like to see how it stacks up against the Classic Audio stuff- they cost twice as much as the Classic Audio speakers do.