Speakers The single most critical component

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....

Power is cheap and the market is flooded with 200 plus watt per channel amps.  It doesn’t make sense to say that amps hardly matter but efficiency in a speaker is paramount.  Why is efficiency important if you can readily find enough power and the quality of that power doesn’t matter?  To me efficiency IS very important because the best sounding amps are low-powered and amp quality matters a lot.

You can take  Jadis' JA800 mono blocks , thats 4 chassis at like 150+ pounds each, and  pair these monsters witha say Wilson 85bd monster, and it will indeed sound likea   wet blanket has been thrown over the speakers = the JA800 has been rendered down to garbage, with all its pure tube experience sucked bone dry by a  low efficiency xover dinasaur speaker.
AS larry says above, , massive power is not going to deliver  super high fidelity, not when the speaker is below 90db efficiency. 
BIg power amps is not going to make magic happen if the speaker is sucking the life blood out the amperage.
The only way you can acheive super high fidelity is via super high  sensitivty speakers  = aka the new Full Range speakers. (caveat, Vox does have quite a few 91db speakers, but we are talking a  TRUE rating, not fudged, and its a clean  nearly flat sensitivity across the entire fq spectrum,,, more important, extremely low distortion which offers 91db acceptable)
Speakers rule,
They are the Kings in your system, the amp/source serve the speaker as ministers.
 The speakers is The King.
Most xover/low sens designs , please deduct 2db from the manufacturers  spec claims.
Your 87db is now a  miserable 85db. = Good luck with that efficiency. 

@larryi and mozartfan you are both making generalizations that fall apart all over the place. There are some fine sounding low power amps but there are also many fine sounding high powered amps. 85dB/watt/meter is not a problem if you have a Simaudio Moon 888. It is a very expensive solution but it certainly will go loud enough. 64 watts will get you 104 dB at one meter, plenty loud enough. Super efficient loudspeakers are mandatory only if you are using pea watt amplifiers and most of these are just distortion boxes. But, some people like the sound. I have no idea why. My favorite loudspeakers are rated at 89dB/watt/meter. 30 watts will get you to 104 dB. I have another 320 watts to handle the peaks. There are some very efficient full range drivers I would love to hear. I would not mind setting up a system around a Dynakit Stereo 70 for nostalgia reasons.