The performance of a solid state amp might sound subjectively brighter but that’s not because it’s tilting up the highs, but because it’s not rolling them off. A speaker designer who designed a speaker with a highly variable impedance AND tuned it for a flat power response would be an idiot.
@rwortman:
On an ESL sold state is going to sound bright on two accounts- first it is indeed tilting up the highs because of simple physics: as a voltage source it will attempt to double power as impedance is halved, and since ESLs have decreasing impedance as frequency goes up, there are your tilted highs. This simple fact is inescapable. Google the impedance curve of any ESL and you will see what I mean.
The second reason is low level higher ordered harmonic distortion, which causes solid state amps to be bright to begin with and this is why tubes are still around 60 years after being declared ’obsolete’.
I would be hesitant to call speaker designers who
designed a speaker with a highly variable impedance AND tuned it for a flat power response would be an idiot.
an idiot.
Some of them are quite brilliant, and like the way tubes sound. You might also consider that before about 1956 or so, all speakers were driven by flat power response as that was the only game in town.