We should reject hard-to-drive speakers more often

As @bdp24 noted, if you can drive the bottom 2-3 octaves with a separate amplifier, it provides many more options for the rest of the range.

I have planar-magnetic dipole line arrays which are ~98db/w sensitivity, nominally 8 ohms with a minimum impedance of about 5 ohms. I'm driving these with a 300B SET amp and they sound glorious, but they only play down to about 170Hz.

The woofers for the bottom few octaves are considerably less efficient and driven with their own 370W class A/B amp and provide plenty of output to below 20Hz.

The combination can play full-range music louder than I want to listen in my 27' x 17' listening room. 

Obviously a bi-amped system is not for everyone, but by splitting out the bass, the rest of the range can be much more efficient without sacrificing sound quality.

I have owned several of both types, 86db to 100db efficient and I have found that the more efficient speakers play more effortlessly without sounding forced…more relaxed with better dynamic scale.

I have tried, relentlessly, for 30 years to find a high efficiency speaker I enjoy.  It has been a total failure, I have tried hundreds if not thousands of pairs.  Everything by Klipsch makes my ears bleed, Zu's excite my cats too much, Tannoys and most others are ridiculously expensive and leave me completely cold. When amplifiers with more than 30 watts were expensive it was worth the effort. I now use a 40 watt tube amp to drive Audio Physic speakers that are 89dB and 4 Ohms, the work effortlessly. 

@ricred1 

My room is L-shaped...front wall is 20’ wide, length is 26’, rear wall is 26’ wide, and 9’ ceiling. My room is rather "neutral", not too lively and not dark.

With those speakers in a room of that size I would expect you'll need about 200-400 Watts. I don't know of an integrated amp that makes that much power. 

I think I understand where Eric is coming from.

In my view, it is all right that there is a wide range of speaker technologies, ranging from ultra-efficient to very much inert such as certain panels and plasma tweeters. They all have their unique sound characteristics, their inherent strengths and weaknesses. So we have a wide range of choice and experience.

However, what I find sad is the fact that there has a been a trend to make such speakers hard to drive which necessarily need not be hard to drive. That tendency was fueled by folly to imitate the more expensive hard to drive technologies with the much cheaper regular electrodynamic drivers - just plop in a crossover to kill the output level and suck out the amplifiers energy and waste it as heat. That way manufacturers can boast that their normal speakers are now hard to drive, just like the coveted hard to drive technologies.

What the unsuspecting customer is unaware of, is the fact that their inefficient beast would likely sound much better if it had been designed with a proper crossover, and used proper driver complement in the first place. As, the second reason for speakers being inefficient is that the driver compelemnt does not match each other and the designers need to use excessive crossover EQ to match them, So, effectively, covering up poor parts choices (which are always driven by the lower cost).

Now, as far as getting these insensitive speakers at low prices - there's nothing wrong with that. The folly is though, that these badly designed speakers are often sold at a premium.

Now, that's the reason for rejection. But I do understand varietas delectat, and people while being very frugal im most situations, are willing to be completely vulnerable when it comes to well-marketed products.

After all, who would question the integrity of such companies, as for example B&W?

PS: while a high power amp CAN drive a 2R load, it sounds much better, with a fraction of distortion driving an 8R load..... had that 2R speaker been designed with proper driver complement & crossover, it would sound significantly better with the same beast of an amp...