Efficient speakers -- What was your journey from A to B to ?

Coherent Audio built on Radian coaxial drivers are great speakers.

I listened to their model 18 a couple of times on the Montreal Audio Show. These speakers are really easy to drive. Actually the 300B SET did it very easily and the sound filled a big room.

In contrast, a modern JBL and Tannoy are designed for transistor amplifiers that have a heavy bass driver that don't afford them to work well on low volume and with small power amplification.

I've tried a whole bunch of efficient speakers since realizing that conventional speakers lose something in translation.  Avantgarde horns are the ones for me - they make everything else sound likes cones-in-a-box.  They are so awesome that two of my buddies sold their speakers (Wilson Sophia and Focal Utopia Be) to replace them with Avantgardes.  They couldn't go back to listening to their systems after hearing mine, and all three of us hopped off the gear-go-round after getting them, which says it all.

Not sure if this has been covered here but its important to realize efficient does not mean easy load. Not easy load means not just any amp will do to get the best performance possible.

Nothing wrong with any of the speakers mentioned as long as proper amp matching is done.

I have gone through similar gyrations considering "more efficient" speakers. But more efficient just means louder not better. For better, you want speakers that are easy to drive with any amp, and that would be Fritz speakers. There may be others but those are ones I know, have heard and can vouch for the fact that they will perform well and go reasonably loud even with most any amp. I heard them with a flea powered tube amp at Capital Audiofest a few years back and was won over.

Having said that, teh best high efficiency speaker sound I recall ever hearing was with a pair of large custom goto horns at the very first ever Capital Audiofest years back. Others I have not heard that I would love to be able to audition but have very low WAF are Jadis Eurythmie and Avantgarde. I’m sure there are others. I tend to always like Klipsch Heritage speakers when I hear those and would consider those to be very good relative values worth consideration. Volti as well. Have heard and liked Spatial as well but not sure if those qualify as truly high efficiency.

Mapman,

I heard the Goto speakers at the same first Capital Audiofest.  It was indeed a nice sounding horn system, but Goto systems are wildly impractical (giant, straight throated horns) in terms of size and price (more than most people's homes for just the drivers).  Goto and another company ALE make good compression drivers.  Both are companies whose engineers came from Yoshimura Laboratories (YL), a company that was itself dedicated to making drivers to sound like Western Electric compression drivers.  Goto and ALE diverged a bit from YLin that their approach to improving the compression driver meant the driver covered a narrower frequency band.  When it comes to midrange compression drivers, I tend to like older, vintage drivers, like the Western Electric, YL, International Projector Company, and Racon, and the current Japanese company G.I.P. Laboratories which clones Western Electric field coil compression drivers; I don't know of modern compression drivers that perform as well.