Good Speakers for Rock and Roll Under 15K

Can you measure dynamics and punch of a speaker?

@mofojo

Yes. There is something called ’thermal compression’ that has to do with the voice coil heating with bass notes and the like. When the voice coil heats, its harder for the amp to put current through it. The voice coil heats and cools with individual bass notes. So the result is less punch and its quite measurable.

The more efficient the speaker, the less this is a problem, generally speaking. You can do things on the design side like vented magnets to try to reduce this problem, but at the end of the day you tend to get more punch with more efficient speakers.

IMO/IME there really isn’t any reason to have a low efficiency speaker unless small size is really important. Higher efficiency speakers don’t take a back seat in terms of resolution, in fact can be more revealing. You do get into a problem making bass, and that can get expensive to overcome (for example TAD used to make the 15" 1602 driver, which was a good $2000 per driver, but were 97dB and had a free air resonance of 22Hz).

However, you can overcome the bass thing with subs. If you set up a distributed bass array, you can have good bass from 80Hz and down handled by the subs. Since each sub is handling only 1/4 of the total bass energy, they are less likely to get into thermal compression problems.

My musical tastes are very rock-centric.  60s, "classic" rock, heavy metal, punk, electronic, alt-country...

I have a pair of Volti Rivals in one room and Fleetwood Devilles in the other.  Both are superb with everything I listen to (and I'm running the Devilles with a 40 wpc tube amp).  If you ever have heard the Rivals as a show, you have probably heard them with a 20 wpc Border Patrol amp.  Both rigs sound "live". 

Good speakers can play anything. Period.

Yamaha NS-5000 is the detail power speaker. It is also fairly rare so it will perform better on the resale market. They handle 600 watts maximum so rock and roll will sound excellent. The design is handsome and space efficient for WAF. The woofer reveals drum/bass textures better than any I have heard. To get the best out of them you will need at least 400 watts. They used their technology resources to make beryllium obsolete despite those 200,000 NS-1000's with Be tweeters they sold.