Speakers The single most critical component

As someone who has been perpetually in the upgrade sickness.. I can tell you that no matter  how great your components are, it’s all for not if you have crap speakers!
the speakers deliver the truth! Therefore, the speakers are the key component, or the foundation for which all other components must pass through.

this is why I feel the speakers are the most important step in audio nervana.

this is why I feel the speakers are the most important step in audio nervana.

I know very well that my Mission Cyrus speakers are only "relatively" good speakers....In their price bracket even if they punch over...

Then why i dont want to upgrade my speakers ? even if i could....

Is this because my speakers branded name is the most important link ?

Not at all....

Total acoustic mechanical controls after a well done passive material treatment...

A Helmholtz mechanical equalizer and diffusers...

And some others tools i will not mention here....

Room acoustic rule ESPECIALLY in small room under 20 feet....

Room acoustic is the sleeping princess, anything else are only the seven working dwarves....


It is very important to know that science could overpower any marketing claim...

No speaker beat the room where they work...

But a controlled room can throw "relatively" any good speakers on the audiophile moon...

This is my experience resulting from my experiments.... Not from my "no limit" purchasing power and ability to boast about my branded name product of choice...

I paid 50 bucks my speakers used....😁😊 I can boast about that luck....

They will ashame most owner of better speakers here that dont know how to use acoustic.... They will not perhaps beat them but the margin of S.Q. between mine and some others relatively to price will awake some from market publicity to science: Acoustic.....

For sure anybody must buy some "relatively good" speakers first....

But it is of no avail in an average uncontrolled room... You will only live without ever knowing what your speakers are able to do in optimal environment...

Forget upgrade money, buy an acoustic book....

Or a biography of Helmholtz....  😊

@hubbman,

A nice summing up that could save someone an awful lot of time and money.

Whatever magic @mahgister has conjured up through optimum embedding of his system could only be more wondrous through better speakers than his Missions.

In my experience no other component offers a greater pound for pound range of performance than a pair of loudspeakers.

In fact the only one I found that came remotely close was turntables. Nowadays, I'm not even too sure of that. One good test would be to compare a Rega Planar 1 against the Planar 10.

On the other hand you cannot easily mistake a pair of Tannoy Westminster's for a pair of their entry level bookshelves.

LMA: Efficiency is NOT the only thing that matters in engines or drivers.

Phusis: And yet it's rarely prioritized or recognized as even ONE of the core parameters in speaker engineering.

Lone Mountain: Who on earth told you that?  That's not true.  Transducer engineers HAVE to consider ALL parameters to achieve a result that fits the target.  More bass?  Smaller size? Lower distortion?  High reliabliity?   Needs to be cheap?  Needs to be high performance?  Part of a mulitway application so bandwidth to 20K isn't an issue?  A zillion decisions to make by the product manager/engineer in driver design with a specific goal in mind.    So it goes like this:  "I need a LF driver in a three way that has the lowest distortion possible, rolls off at around 42 Hz, system levels are to be 100dB sustained without failure for 24hrs.  Price has to be under $500 retail".  That's a helluva puzzle to solve.  Most speaker manufacturers call up a their wholesale driver supplier and see how close they can get to something off the shelf that achieves that.  Someone like Peerless in India, or JBL in India. Some try and build their own, like ATC.        
Transducers (drivers) are one of the most significant physics puzzles of audio, involving materials science, hydraulics, electrical science, acoustics, mechanics- its a true rubiks cube.   It is not some afterthought.   

LMA: From product management experience at JBL and with ATC, a driver can be optimized for bandwidth OR efficiency. If you want more low end from a driver, it WILL be less efficient.  IF you are willing to forgo some low end, you can go for efficiency.

Phusis: To some extend at least you can have your cake and eat it too: add size, but that's usually the one thing audiophilia wants to avoid, so, in that case it's either/or.  

Lone Mountain: A transducer engineer, a good one, cannot set an issue aside cause he's guessing what his customer's customer cares about.  They are engineering to hit some goal, always narrowly defined; there is no " oh lets go through a 5 year process to build this new driver and spend 10s of thousands on tooling and lets just see what we get when we are done".  They know what the target is, they are working with materials and designs of things like formers and coils and spiders LONG before the first new driver is built.  There is no guessing in engineering-most principles are well understood.  There might be some experimentation, but that requires a very well funded engineering department and some very deep insight.  Ray Cooke is such a person (KEF), as is Billy Woodman (ATC), Floyd Toole (JBL), Doug Button (JBL), etc etc.         

Efficiency has it biggest influence because it determines what else you can or can't do in your design.  Picking efficiency out of the very long list of design criteria as THE pointer to performance is like saying that one spec (THD) defines how great a piece of electronics sounds, one spec (MPG) tells you how good the car is, one spec (brightness) tells you how good a TV is.   All of us involved in the making of audio gear know this idea is not true- unless we are unaware or just ignore all the other differences.  There are some highly efficient speakers that just sound awful, no?  Tube PreAmps sound amazing to many yet the THD spec indicates it would be horrible.  Vinyl vs digital files- need I go on?    

You are trying to reduce a very complex issue into some simple yes/no question and that is not possible with transducers or audio in general.

Brad   

Whatever magic @mahgister has conjured up through optimum embedding of his system could only be more wondrous through better speakers than his Missions.

I dont know why people dont understand my point....

FIRST: i own Tannoy dual gold speakers for a long time and they are better than my actual Mission...

SECOND: how can someone argue against a common place fact like: some speakers are better than others ?

Third: my claim is instead of going with the urge to upgrade their speakers, why not listening what they are able to do with acoustic basic laws...

Fourth:

There is no " magic" in science based controls of mechanical vibrations, electrical noise floor, and acoustic...


Instead of buying costly speakers i recommend to people to buy a book about acoustic.... 😁😁


The urge for upgrade is most of the times waste of money because many  dont understand the basic of embeddings controls in the 3 working dimensions of any audio system....

Is it not clear and simple ?

Then opposing to my affirmation the meaningless fact that some Tannoy speakers are better than Mission is a commom place fact not an argument....