We should reject hard-to-drive speakers more often


Sorry I know this is a bit of a rant, but come on people!!

Too many audiophiles find speakers which are hard to drive and... stick with them!

We need to reject hard-to-drive speakers as being Hi-Fi. Too many of us want our speakers to be as demanding as we are with a glass of wine. "Oh, this speaker sounds great with any amplifier, but this one needs amps that weigh more than my car, so these speakers MUST sound better..."

Speakers which may be discerning of amplifier current delivery are not necessarily any good at all at playing actual music. 

That is all.

erik_squires

In the opening, the OP said out loud that ...

 

It is really hard to get nuance across in a single sentence so I really am happy when readers take the time to digest the entire paragraph. Of course no one types things perfectly, and hard thoughts often require multiple drafts to craft well.

My apologies for the confusion but overall I stand by the entire paragraph, as a whole:

 

We need to reject hard-to-drive speakers as being Hi-Fi. Too many of us want our speakers to be as demanding as we are with a glass of wine. "Oh, this speaker sounds great with any amplifier, but this one needs amps that weigh more than my car, so these speakers MUST sound better..."

I realize that there are technological marvels which may be very hard to drive because of the way they are stretching the state of the art. The legendary Apogee ribbon speakers are probably the best example I know of at 1 Ohm resistive, and if that’s your thing go get some.

My complaint is more about the machismo that hard to drive speakers are naturally better sounding, and more hi-fi than speakers which meet their spec, and stay at 4 Ohms or higher.  Of course there are great sounding but hard-to-drive speakers as well.

I’d also like to point out that there’s a sub-thread here about high efficiency speakers which is not mine, I take no responsibility for those statements regarding efficiency vs. sound quality.

Post removed 

yes low impedance in upper registers is nothing to worry about but tuning impedance curve in the lower registers to design a speakers desired characteristic. I am thinking Wilson speakers would be a good example some Wilson’s are known for having great slam in the lower registers, does this make sense or am I completely off base here?

@jeffrey75 I don’t think Wilson is doing what you’re suggesting, if that’s what you mean by ’off base’.

Take ATC speaker/driver as an example, if one desires a good low frequency extension out of a small-to-medium sealed enclosure (which I prefer) design speaker with a given size of driver, efficiency has to be sacrificed.

@lanx0003 While this is certainly true, what about large multi-driver full range speakers that are really hard to drive? They don’t get the Murphy that a smaller speaker does for low efficiency.

I might see this a bit differently because our ears hear on a logarithmic curve. I figure if 100 Watts won’t do the job, 200 or 400 Watts won’t either because 2 or 4x more power isn’t that much louder- 3 or 6dB. To get to a perceived ’twice as loud’ its generally accepted that you need 10x more power. In radio parlance this is known as ’gold plated deciBels’; 1000Watts, I think we can all agree, simply isn’t practical.

Fortunately for we humans, distortion of lower frequencies isn’t as audible/objectionable to our ear/brain mechanism as is distortion of higher frequencies. Right, Ralph? Since the beginning of hi-fi and continuing to this day, woofers commonly produce 10% (and higher) harmonic distortion. If a tweeter produced that much distortion it would be unlistenable.

If only @kenjit would put into production one of his perfect loudspeaker designs. The selfish sob is keeping them all to himself.

@bdp24.... What if a few of us got together to try to design a speaker, we all liked.......This is the thing, and it is ok. We each like what we like, without need to defend why. Unfortunately, many are still searching for that " perfect sound forever ". And Eric, I meant zero offense. We all just need to lighten up a little. My best, always, MrD..