Chat with legendary loudspeaker engineer Laurie Fincham ...

Mike

Moreover, the claim that high efficiency is necessarily and always bound to be attained "with a price," sonically speaking, is a fallacy.

Generally, high efficiency speakers have sounded unrealistic. What do the masses think of and come to conclusions when they’re thinking high efficiency? There it is, it can be attributed largely to bad actors like Klipsch, who’re all over the place and generally made plenty of flawed speakers with a couple of exceptions perhaps. It also seems like any other jester will come up with some horn speaker whilst tinkering in his garage, bring it to shows, etc and they’ve sounded stupid.

Nevertheless, when you buy a high efficiency speaker from guys who really know what they are doing, they seem to sound truthful. ...

Dear @ghasley : You say that prefers no negative feedback and maybe because you have a deep misunderstood on feedback amp issue but some of us can learn about in this link coming for a truly expert engineering:

whitepaper (sotaturntables.com)

He was designer in Analog Devices Inc: "

Several years? I was with ADI- designing a wide variety of ICs for almost forty years and was most fortunate to become an ADI Fellow and Senior Fellow.

I am not a free-lance engineer. I retired from ADI a few years ago and I design audio (and other gear) for fun and for free, "

Sometimes post in Agon and is a gentlemans that we have to listen and read him. But as always are other people that just never learned due to their own or audio sale agenda,  especially in electronics items.

R.

Dear @lonemountain  " most bad decisions in audio are made based on bad info or lack of info.  There is a lot of misleading info posted on forums "

yes, but in the forums are many very good information ( not bad information ) where we can learn. I learned in this thread with several of the posts of gentlemans that have higher knowledge level in the specific regards that me and one of them is @phusis  and other like them.

Btw, I remember listened 4-5 times in the past the original Wilson Watt and this is a fantastic true monitor not high efficiency as a horn but measured 91db and this Watt has a problem for any amplifier ( tubes forbidden with ) at 1khz its impedance surve measures 1ohm and near 2khz 0.32 ohm . IN those times the preffered amps for it were Krell and Spectral.

As a fact David Wilson made it all his Wilson Audio LP Recordings using in the studio the Watts and at Wilson place the WAMMs. I own all those fantastic recordings that are impressive: microphones by Sennheiser ( recordings in the late 80's ), Recorder by John Curl, cables by Bruce Brisson. We have to remember that DW before started in the speaker design was a recording engineer for several years.

R.

Dear  @daveyf  : I think that in many ways the speaker impedance curve and phase is way more important than efficiency.

Almost no speaker manufacturer ( if not all of them. ) gives to the owners that speaker measured characterisatics and normally only gives the speaker " nominal " impedance.

With out those 2 characteristics how any speaker owner could mate in a " decent " way the amp for his speakers audio system?

The Watt had pretty decent efficiency at 91 db but those very low impedances happens  in a very usual frequency range where MUSIC comes.

That's why several audio system owners are not satisfied with the speaker or amp or boths.

R.