When does speaker distortion become audible?

Wc: Way over simplified. There are still lots of people who haven't experienced "better sound" from what their tv or table radio offered. They would't kow what distortion sounded like if they fell over on it.

Mapman, you put my question in better perspective and I should have mentioned sonething about it in the original post, but thats what I was trying to understand, if distortion is audible when listening at low volumes and when a speaker WASN''T being over driven or anywhere near being overdriven.

My paradigms always seemed to have good highs, a little bright and somewhat (too?) revealing, but when I hooked up some speakers with seas excel drivers the treble seemed to tighten up (for a lack of better description). It seems like there was alot more hiss or overhang or distortion?, I don't know, thats why I am asking you guys...

Oh, and what about metal domes vs. silk? All my other speakers had metal, these are silk, maybe less tizz or something?

When you got garbage speakers!!

I'd be wary if you don't have good a/b capability. You may be listening to truncated information. The highs are critical to spatial presentation and what you were hearing before may have been a truthful exposure of the source limitations. I have a number of tubes, cables, and capacitors trialed in my system that eventually exited because they were doing information subtraction.

Most of the speakers have overhunged motors (narrow gap, long coil) producing a lot of distortions especially at longer excursions (bass). Underhung motors (big magnet, wide gap, short coil) produce less distortions (are more linear) but are more expensive and not very common. Acoustic Zen Adagios have "underhung" woofers. Underhung is sometimes even used in tweeters to reduce distortions at high power (long excursions) - Morel Supreme 110.

http://www.gattiweb.com/images/delta_design/Supreme110.pdf