What is the best HEAVY METAL speaker?

Call me crazy, but I listen to mostly rock and heavy music on Martin Logan ascents. They sound great to me, and 95db is no problem. That's more then loud enough for me.

"... if a speaker is really good at classical music, it will be good with metal too."

I kinda disagree. IMHO classical is very a forgiving music genre (from a tonal perspective). I've heard classical well-reproduced on Quads and Maggies and Martin Logans. I've never heard metal well-reproduced on any of those speaker brands.

if a speaker system can do full tilt boggie warp 9 orchestral music without limits, it will easily rock your world with Heavy Metal. no worries at all. full on orchestral, or organ, or choral......is the most demanding of any genre. maybe 'big band' might be '1-a' as the second most demanding genre.

and getting full orchestral or big band 'right' was the driving force behind my system and room development. large scale 'rock' or 'heavy metal' performance came along with the ride.

but no one would consider Quads, or Maggies, or Martin Logans to be ideal for full on orchestral if you seek the full effect. the bottom octave or two is lacking, as is the heft and weight in the mid bass/lower mids. certainly those brands have excellent refinement and transparency to offer in the balance of trade-offs. so using those to make your point fails.

OTOH speaker systems that might work for Heavy Metal might not get the refinement to work at full on orchestral.

there is no place to hide with large scale orchestral music. I can tell you that. every small step forward brings you more with Classical as the information will reveal itself more and more. with Heavy Metal since it lacks the textures the improvements in the performance are not as evident (none the less refinement does help the Heavy Metal too).

my system is able to do full on Orchestral......and any Heavy Metal you can throw at it.

Holy smokes I bet that does handle anything you throw at it Mike!

I've had 3 friends go out and but ML after hearing mine, and they all listen to rock primarily. Then again, we aren't able to come close to considering your level of system or room so....

The highs are what seem harsh to me on other speakers. I always end up wanting to turn it down, when the opposite should be going on.

The only thing I've heard that I liked better was a set of aerial 20t's connected to all the new Ayre reference stuff. Again, on another level performance and price wise as well.

Big active ATC or PMC

Anyone who thinks a speaker that is good a classical can't also be good at metal just has not heard how hard a proper classical LP can be on a system.

Speakers and electronics really don't care what the signal is. If they are good at their job they will not be genre-specific. Its really that simple- if a speaker is better at one thing than another, its not a very good speaker.

I have two LPs that can bring most stereos to their knees in no time flat, if realistic volumes are being played. The first is of course Black Sabbath's Paranoid, on the original import white label Vertigo. The sound is astonishing and the bass energy simply saps most systems straightaway. The other LP is The Verdi Requiem, on the RCA Soria series. Play track 2 side 1 at a lifelike level and see if your system can handle the full dynamic range. Most can't.

The speakers I use are the Classic Audio Loudspeakers model T-3, which are 98 db 1 watt/1 meter and 16 ohms. Its very hard to clip a 60 watt amp on them!! I can literally get the building to shake, as the speakers go down to 20Hz. They are revealing and dynamic.

Metal is often compressed- we've mastered several metal LPs in the last couple of years and I have plenty of metal titles in my collection. Death metal in particular tends to be mostly guitar and I'm sorry but its just not that hard to reproduce. The more challenging recordings are usually not Death Metal- one I love to play at shows is Aesma Deava's second album, the Eros of Frigid Beauty (on Root of All Evil). This is a classical metal form, well recorded and very dynamic. Another title which is more Gothic classical metal is Therion's Vovin, which features choir and a string section in addition to the metal band.

Have fun!