The best speaker you ever heard?

Ct, yes I understand that dilemma. It's hard to compare the Magico S5 to Vandy 7 as most Dealers carry either one or the other line, but not both. And show conditioners are never, or rarely ideal.

I can see the money in the Vandersteen 7. Use of carbon-lined cabinets in particular would add a lot of cost. The Vandy 7's are a similar to Dartzeel amps..they are hand tuned for high performance and demand a lot from upstream equipment and careful setup. Vandersteen supplies a laser level for good reason as the 7's have a narrow sweet spot. But once setup correctly they can sound amazing.

The 7's carbon/balsa drivers are not that dissimilar to Magico's carbon nano-tech/rohacell M380 midrange which uses extremely light and strong carbon cones with extremely lightweight rohacell foam as a dampening material. This midrange is fast, nails female voice and has wonderful tone, timbre and texture/body which to me is the essence real music. I'm sure Richard Vandersteen's mid does one or two things a bit better, likewise Magico's Q series mid shines in other areas.

I agree that developing a good relationship with a Dealer is essential to getting the right advice & being able to sit down and audition gear to see what sounds good to you. At the end of the day, you only need to please one person. Btw, nice system and congrats on your Vandy Treo's!

The best speakers I have heard have all been fairly easy to drive. Getting saddled with a hard to drive speaker is next to criminal in my opinion- if you can't play all the volume you want with 200 watts you are in big trouble due to something often called 'gold plated decibels'.

The idea has to do with the fact that it takes double the amplifier power to increase the volume by 3 db which is not a lot by the human ear. The trick is that your amplifier has to produce musical power- and the smaller the amp (tube or solid state) often the better it might sound being the popular wisdom (actually I think our amps fly in the face of that, but they the unusual exception). So you might a musical amplifier that makes 200 watts, but how many are really out there than can make 400 watts or 1200? The fact of the matter is that if you want an amplifier of that sort of power that sounds like music, you can count the number of amps that qualify worldwide on your hands.

In short, its impractical to have a speaker that requires a lot of power regardless of its price. I usually draw the line at about 86 db 1 watt/1 meter - anything below that is not really a contender for the best speaker in the world- the math simply does not allow it.

Now keep in mind the difference between efficiency (which I think is a more honest statement of how easy the speaker is to drive) and sensitivity (which is 2.83 volts at one meter). If the speaker is 4 ohms instead of 8 ohms, subtract 3 db from the sensitivity figure to get the efficiency figure.

So if you have a speaker that is 86db sensitivity and is also 4 ohms, its actual efficiency is 83 db. In my room, which is 17' x21', I need about 200 watts to make a speaker of 89 db play to a satisfying level. If I had a speaker as in the preceding example, I would need 800 watts to do the same job. If we flip this around, right now my speakers have 98 db, which means that I only need about 25 watts to do the same job right now. Its a lot lot easier to find a nice sounding 25-watt amp than one that make 800 watts!!

So far impedance has not been explored but that too plays a huge role in the sound of speakers. Not directly, but it affects the amps playing the speaker, whether tube or solid state or class D. Essentially, all amps make more distortion into lower impedances, and the distortions that they make are higher ordered harmonics and increased IM distortion, both of which are easily audible. In addition, the lower the impedance the more critical the speaker cable becomes! Conversely a 16 ohm speaker is not critical of the cable, and all amps make less distortion driving the higher impedance.

So if the speaker forces the amp to work harder, you will hear increased distortion. In a nutshell, such a speaker cannot possibly be the best except in theory, as in the real world the amps driving it won't sound like music- they will sound like electronics. If you like a nice hifi, this is OK, but if you want real music, this is something to keep in mind.

Two speakers that I like a lot as they are easy to drive and are full range are the Sound Lab Majestic, which has gotten very easy to drive with a change that was made about a year and a half ago. The other speaker is the Classic Audio Loudspeakers model T-1.4, which is 16 ohms and 98 db 1 watt/1 meter and goes to 20Hz no worries. Rather than say 'this is the best speaker' I like to think about what speakers might be the top 5 or top 10 made world wide. These are two examples. Sorry to say, many of the speakers I have seen on this thread don't belong there IMO. Some do though...

Sorry with my last post if you see spelling or grammatical errors- clicked 'submit' accidentally...

Genesis 2.2jr. Is it live or is it Genesis? Arnie Nudell...You are a genius!

Melbguy, great post. Thanks for sharing. I listen to the Magico's a bit more now and have heard a few of their models, but don't remember all the numbers. With my MS, I can't always remember the model names. Some yes, some no. I usually remember the price ranges. I honestly am not sure if I've ever heard them set up properly. I think some dealers just have lines they like, but they don't always go great together. Even at the upper line of components I've seen/heard this at most shops. That's the biggest reason I drive 2 plus hours to support someone. I have plenty of shops near me and they are all very good and have good component, but I've yet to hear them at their best, so I wasn't able to hear what I want out of them, which is music. I want emotion. I recently heard the Genesis 2.2 and didn't love them. They sounded good and all, but the highs were bit too emphasized for MY ear and they weren't the most coherent. That may have been set up, but he said that he FINALLY had them dialed in. They just made everything we listened to sound BIG. Even Jazz at the Pawn Shop sounded like it was in a huge venue and it's a small place kind of like the Blue Note in NYC. That's what I listen for in some of these SUPER SPEAKERS. I honestly haven't liked any of the speakers over 100k that I've heard compared to the same companies speakers under 100k. I haven't heard all by ANY means, but I've been able to hear many within the last year or so. I have some friends who are well off, but not audiophiles and have no idea what they have other than something really expensive and big. I wonder how many of the engineers actually still hear lot's of live music these days. It's nice to have some great choices though.