Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused
17 of 23 speakers in my studio and home theater systems are internally powered. My studio system is all Genelec and sounds very accurate. I know the best new concert and studio speakers are internally powered there are great technical reasons to design a speaker and an amp synergistically, this concept is much more important to sound quality than the vibration systems we often buy. How can an audiophile justify a vibration system of any sort with this in mind.
If you ever come up with a recommendation for my $40K active home theater I will consider you "unlost". Until then, a guy with your handle that can't even put together a system, in an audio chat room, surrounded by threads about systems, that claims to read everything, every month related to audio, does seem to be ............ |
To have such a list, there would need to be variables associated with each component. I would challenge anyone to come up with the variables for that list. They would start with resistance in some form; amplifier output resistance, cable resistance, speaker input resistance (impedance over frequency). Then they would sit for hours trying to come up with a second quantifiable variable. Maybe they would add a check box column for compatibility; some amplifiers do not like very low impedance speakers. Most solid state amplifiers will behave the same no matter what speaker you connect them to. Most tube amplifiers will behave differently for every speaker you connect them to. Amplifier/speaker "compatibility" is a losing/loose proposition that may by luck improve a speaker/room issue by a small measure that could have been definitively solved by much better methods. The distortion mechanism of tubes is a wild card. Speakers are never independent of rooms. I don’t think a compatibility score is possible as the speaker room interaction could negate any result you arrive at. For headphones, I have seen specialized amplifiers for specific headphones, and only those headphones. They implement custom equalization for that headphone. Apparently the tube amplifier with headphones shtick is similar to the tube amplifier with speakers shtick. Tube amplifiers for headphones are much higher output resistance than SS amplifiers. OTL tube amplifiers like their speaker counterparts are very high output resistance. Depending on the headphone, that is a large change in the frequency response. Headphones are all over the place with frequency response. Not hard to see a tube amplifier often resulting in an improved frequency response.
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@thespeakerdude I'm sorry for even making you think of that. Thanks for the answer. It would be a frustrating project because it's practically untestable. |
Even for us, where the speaker is connected directly to the amplifier, if it is a simple voltage drive amplifier, there is simply no discussion of amplifier matching, other than can it drive the load, and can it achieve the target output level and distortion level. It is not that hard to design an amplifier that adds no audible coloration to the output even for very low distortion drivers. The amplifier distortion is always << driver distortion. We have thousands of hours in listening tests and we still listen to every design, every speaker, and compare to reference amplification. Only on more sophisticated amplifier-driver integrations, where we are not using pure voltage drive, is matching not only a consideration, but an integral part of the design process. |
