Speakers for leading edge, transients, speed and big sound

Von Schweikert speakers with a easy placement due to their adjustable active bass.  The more expensive models have more adjustments.  The smaller, less expensive models play big, superior dispersion and adding a pair of 10" shockwave subs should power/balance the sound in moderately large size rooms.  Otherwise, Rockports are balanced sounding with outstanding sonic characteristics.  If you want precision over musicality, there are many modern speakers from Vivid, Magico, Wilson, B&W, Borressen, et.al.  which will fill the bill, the bigger units with bigger, defined and fast bass.

The low excursion drivers employ different kinds of surrounds, such as pleated fabric surrounds that sound cleaner to me, particularly at the upper end of the range the woofer is playing.  I suppose there are technical/theoretical explanations why woofers sound as they do (e,g, low excursion woofers have much lower doppler effect frequency modulation), but I don’t know why but they often do sound good to me.  Yes, iI hear plenty of good sounding systems employing small high excursion drivers, so  I am merely saying that I like many of these old school woofers, not that any design is always better.

@devinplombier Wrote:

 especially fast, bass?

Fast Bass, Slow Bass - Myth vs. Fact See Here. Choosing a woofer see here. 

Mike

No a JBL speaker isn't a Cerwin Vega tribute. JBL does everything with the backbone of research and development. That K2 S9900 is a great horn design as is with almost all JBL Horn designs. They're the best at Horn Loaded home speakers

Mike, that old Lansing Heritage paper is a very good and very approachable analysis of woofer design, with the caveat of course that it is limited to JBL products (naturally).

That other article is just one man’s opinionated screed. While I’ll be the last to dismiss the importance of a seamless and harmonious woofer-midrange integration (why so many planars fail), it isn’t the be-all and end-all and woofer quality does matter.

Since we’re on the subject of "fast" bass I just want t point out that it is generally understood as not just how fast a woofer can accelerate to, say, 30 Hz (a low bar for sure), but perhaps more importantly how fast it stops.

Hence the servo systems developed by Arnie Nudell and others that employed piezo accelerometers mounted on individual woofers to feed acceleration data to circuitry that controlled cone excursion in real time.

@larryi I completely get your point. I guess it’s like tubes and vinyl in a way; despite the mess of stunted frequency responses, low channel separation and massive distortion they sound delightful. I get that the same goes for woofers.

I strongly suspect that I couldn’t live happily with speakers that are down 6 dB at 55 Hz (JBL’s spec), but I respect those who see beyond that. An additional caveat is that I have not auditioned the K2, and I am open to the possibility that their sound somehow transcends their underwhelming spec. Wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happens 🙂