Speaker sensitivity vs SQ

«audio2design to @tomic601 , that makes no sense at all.
If you go into an actual natural environment, short of being in a cave, or very close to a cliff, or in front of a large tree, the only source of reflection is the ground, and normally that is dirt and somewhat soft (absorptive) ground cover. Trees by virtue of being somewhat round, make excellent diffusers. That negates your whole argument right there.
That nature you mentioned? Predominantly it behaves more like an anechoic chamber w.r.t. music reproduction than it does the average listening room.»

Complete non sense, an anechoic chamber ideal is absolute silence measured in Db....Nature is anything except absolute  artificially designed "silence" measured in Db....

«Also negating your argument is your room is not the recording studio, or the concert hall, or the church. For the most part you want to negate the impact of the room so that the acoustical cues in the recording are clearly communicated to the ears/brain and you hear what was recorded.»

Complete non sense the recording cues from different microphones and different location are RECREATION after trade-off choices from the recording engineer, not PURE reproduction....Then for the most part we want our room to be an helper to facilitate the concrete recreation of our experience of timbre; the information about timbre being partially lost or distorted by virtue of the trade -off choices in the recording process....Our room can compensate and facilitate or impede this natural recreation....

«Removing early/loud reflections via speaker placement, broad band absorbers, and diffusion absolutely will do this. Close late reflections are bad too.»

Complete non sense, because first: even world-known acousticians are not in complete agreement about the suppresion or partial use of the early reflections...read this article where Floyd Toole speak positively about using some early reflections but is criticized for that...

https://ethanwiner.com/early_reflections.htm

It is a fact verified by science that speech recognition is greatly improved with some early reflections... Which one and the timing with late reflections is an acoustical complex problem not to be solved by dogmatical ignorance...

https://nrc-publications.canada.ca/eng/view/accepted/?id=dd3c1e7a-8d8d-440e-bbcd-04c69ef20419

«I expect few people have actually heard stereo speakers in an anechoic chamber. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not bad at all, with pin point natural imaging.»

Complete non sense...
Read what musician think about that in this link:

https://www.violinist.com/discussion/archive/23998/

«I expect few people have actually heard stereo speakers in an anechoic chamber. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not bad at all, with pin point natural imaging.
There is a big difference between audio reproduction and a new sound created in a room. Voices sound weird in an anechoic chamber because there is none of the expected echo . Recorded music sounds predominantly natural because the echos are already built into the recording. Your eyes and brain may be at odds though. That nature you mentioned? Predominantly it behaves more like an anechoic chamber w.r.t. music reproduction than it does the average listening room.»

Another nonsense here....What is true for some aspect of imaging is NOT true for timbre perception...These phenonema are correlated yes but not reducible ONLY to frequencies accuracy...

Sound in an anechoic chamber sound a bit like headphone, said Floyd Toole, the sound is in our head...In nature sound dont live in our head , for our survival we must locate sounds and identify clearly speech articulation....Then the metaphor comparing nature lack of echoing walls and anechoic chamber is bullshit....The level of sound recorded in a silent desert cannot be compared to an anechoic chamber by a margin measured around +30 Db......You dont jump because of your heartbeats in a desert, in an echoic chamber you do.... It is even dangerous to live there more than 45 minutes for many people....

"Recorded music sounds predominantly natural because the echoes are already built in the recording" is non sense because it is not the echoes that are built in in the recording but some information about the original room where the musical instrument were recorded with a lost of information and his inevitable distortion by the inevitable trade-off i spoke about linked to the choices made by the engineer between for example the 4 different kind of microphones he can use and their specific location...Not one microphone can record the same information even at the same location....These choices implicate a distortion in the information recorded about timbre for example...

The audiophile room is precisely what can help the recreation of a more natural sound if rightfully designed or acoustically treated, not only to erase some bad timing actions from the walls, but to use and take advantages from some others... It is called positive timing acoustical events...This information coming from our room can help us to recreate the natural timbre of the initial instrument in his living location and compensate in some way for the lost of information or the distorsion of the information coming with the recording process....



I will conclude by saying that the decision to voice or not speakers in an anechoic room is a technical matter in the hand of speakers designer specialist...BUT thinking that an anechoic chamber is good for a musical experience is ridiculous...Designers of speakers can and must ask for EXPERIMENTAL conditions that have NOTHING to do with immediate musical listening conditions and are more linked to the improving process of the limitations of their structural design... Ignorance only can confuse together, digitalisation of sound, acoustical and/or musical information... They are related but are 3 different events or process....

Then pretending that anechoic chamber reveal more information because frequencies perceptions are more "pure" is ignorance clothing in knowledge...
It is like pretending that flying ourself in an aerodynamic chamber or a wind tunnel is the more truthful experience for flying...

Confusing the resistance of the parts of a plane in a wind tunnel with real flying action and impression, is like pretending that the more" accurate" frequencies perception and imaging in an anechoic chamber "sounded more natural" than in a treated acoustical room using reflection and timing events created for human ears to recreate musical timbre and not only imaging ...

Perhaps robot will prefer anechoic chamber....They dont like what seems to them" useless" information, like the "colors" of a stradivarius compared to an ordinary or mediocre violin....Like us humans....😁

Another area where attribution is difficult, the dynamic nature of high efficiency systems.

Is it that, or is it the controlled dispersion?

I'm not saying low compression speakers aren't good. I'm saying that some of what we may attribute to "fast" or high impact speakers is really just better room integration.

Amazing how you can take a slow, muddy, small sounding speaker and transform it with the appropriate room treatment, or how a poor room will sound better with tightly controlled speakers like horns, ESL's and open baffle.

Mijostyn wrote:  "A speaker that can hit 110dB without compression is going to be more dynamic than a speaker that can only get to 100 dB even if it is less efficient."  

Agreed.  

Mijostyn again:  "Another issue is trying to run 15" woofers up to 700Hz then crossing to a horn."  

I understand your skepticsm.

Intuitively it sure seems wrong because it's almost never done in home audio. Actually, running a 15" woofer to 700 Hz is like running a 5" woofer to 2.1 kHz:  For the right kind of 15" woofer, it's a piece of cake.   (The 15" midwoofer I'm using is plus or minus 1 dB to about 1.7 kHz with no filtering, then it has a 3 dB peak at 2 kHz.  Its effective motor-strength-to-moving-mass ratio surpasses every small high-end midwoofer I know of, and falls in the ballpark of 5" cone midranges.)  

Some of the finest studio monitors in the world, the classic Augspurgers and the magnificent JBL M2, use the 15" woofer + horn format.  There are several brief YouTube videos about the M2 which are imo worth watching.

Mijostyn:  "Two very dissimilar drivers crossed right in the meat of the midrange."  

The big woofers and horn-loaded compression drivers are visually dissimilar, but ACOUSTICALLY they are far more similar than most cone midwoof/dome tweet combinations in the crossover region.  Let me explain:  

What we hear is a combination of the direct sound and the reverberant sound, the latter being dominated by the speaker's off-axis response.  Ideally the off-axis response tracks the on-axis response very closely.  However if there is a directivity mis-match in the crossover region, it is impossible for the on-axis response to match the off-axis response through the crossover region.    

A directivity mis-match in the crossover region is almost inevitable for a cone midwoof/dome tweet combination, because the cone's radiation pattern will be narrower than the smaller dome's radiation pattern.  There are two ways around this:  One is to widen the midwoofer's pattern by using (hopefully well-behaved) cone breakup, and the other is to use a horn or waveguide of some sort to deliberately narrow the tweeter's radiation pattern so that it matches the midwoofer's.  

The latter is what I do, only at a lower frequency than most midwoof/tweet combinations.  

Crossover frequencies are a juggling of tradeoffs. Briefly, for a combination of psychoacoustic and practical reasons, imo 700 Hz makes sense.  It arguably makes better psychoacoustic sense than just about any higher frequency does. 

So like I said I understand your skepticism, but I've put some thought into my (often unorthodox) design decisions.  

Duke

@erik_squires wrote: 

"Another area where attribution is difficult, the dynamic nature of high efficiency systems.  

"Is it that, or is it the controlled dispersion?  

"I'm not saying low compression speakers aren't good. I'm saying that some of what we may attribute to "fast" or high impact speakers is really just better room integration."  

I totally agree. 

I would not be surprised to learn that, in practice, room acoustics and radiation patterns usually play as big if not bigger role in real-world dynamic contrast as thermal compression.   

Duke

My point is that dynamics are a matter of volume. A speaker that can hit 110dB without compression is going to be more dynamic than a speaker that can only get to 100 dB even if it is less. efficient. Just a matter of power. Horns are very dynamic because they go very loud. They do it with less power because they tend to be very efficient. As far as sound quality goes, it's a toss up.

Thermal compression occurs with all voice coils. The less efficient the driver, in general there will also be greater thermal compression as the speaker is being asked to deal with more power. As the voice coil heats up (which it does on each individual bass note; yes, they can heat that fast) its ability to move the speaker cone is reduced. Result: lower efficiency speakers tend to have lower dynamic qualities as well and unless you move away from a voice coil M.O., you can't throw more power at it, more power makes it worse. IOW the louder you play, the more compressed it becomes.