Good Speakers for Rock and Roll Under 15K

Can you measure dynamics and punch of a speaker?

@mofojo

Yes. There is something called ’thermal compression’ that has to do with the voice coil heating with bass notes and the like. When the voice coil heats, its harder for the amp to put current through it. The voice coil heats and cools with individual bass notes. So the result is less punch and its quite measurable.

The more efficient the speaker, the less this is a problem, generally speaking. You can do things on the design side like vented magnets to try to reduce this problem, but at the end of the day you tend to get more punch with more efficient speakers.

IMO/IME there really isn’t any reason to have a low efficiency speaker unless small size is really important. Higher efficiency speakers don’t take a back seat in terms of resolution, in fact can be more revealing. You do get into a problem making bass, and that can get expensive to overcome (for example TAD used to make the 15" 1602 driver, which was a good $2000 per driver, but were 97dB and had a free air resonance of 22Hz).

However, you can overcome the bass thing with subs. If you set up a distributed bass array, you can have good bass from 80Hz and down handled by the subs. Since each sub is handling only 1/4 of the total bass energy, they are less likely to get into thermal compression problems.

Any tech dude in the manufacturing space seems to think he knows everything there is to know about music (anything he doesn’t know is all one big myth!). Why don’t you have a seat someday and talk to guys like Levinson (too late for the late Schweikert) who actually understands instruments/music? You may gather more insight.

@deep_333 Yeah, I play string bass and keyboards- played in orchestras, jazz and folk bands, recorded my own albums, mastered LPs on my LP mastering system and recorded/produced other's recordings. I’ve got 4 patents so far, been making amps and preamps that get good reviews and awards in the high end press for the last 45 years. I’m one of those guys ’like Levinson’. I don’t usually talk this way, but you seemed to need to hear it.

I could not disagree more.. 

@mofojo Big myths die hard. So this does not surprise me- I get pushback on it all the time. But it comes down to something very simple, which is can you find a designer who can say what parameters exactly will favor a certain genre?

I've been doing this 45 years and got an engineering degree early on. I know a lot of designers and none of them make any claims to this effect. Since I design amps and preamps I see things a bit differently,  thru the eyes of my test equipment. Once that signal is in the amp, the amp does not care what it is, it just amplifies it. I suspect the same thing for speakers- they have no taste, they just move as the amp tells them.

It’s obvious that a few here have never really listened to Rock, otherwise they would not be recommending Vandersteen, Volti and other speakers that were voiced with Classical and Jazz.

@stereo5 

This is nonsense. Speakers are not 'voiced' using a certain form of music, not if there is a competent designer involved! They may prefer a certain genre, but that won't influence the design for the reasons I presented earlier.

Inefficient speakers struggle because the have thermal compression associated with the voice coil of the drivers involved.  It hurts them with any form of music so isn't rock specific.

I don't think you are going to be in a room and picturing where the lead guitar is vs the bass guitar. 

@willgolf This suggests to me that you've not heard every rock recording out there. I run a studio; we pay attention to where we place instruments in the mix as do many studios! We record the drums with only 2 mics so we get as natural a sound out of them as possible.

You might try playing side one of Islands by King Crimson. This starts out as a jazzy piece and its very well recorded. It transitions to a pretty intense rock sound featuring multiple Mellotron tracks. It has depth and imaging. You might also try a good copy of ELP's first album... I can go on; I hope you get the point.

@gregjacob Its actually a myth that a speaker can be good for one genre of music (rock) and not another. If your speakers aren't good for rock, then they are likely weak with jazz and classical too. Put another way, no-one has ever figured out a way to design any electronics (including speakers) to favor a certain genre.

Put yet another way, what makes a speaker good for rock should make it good for classical, jazz and folk just as well. If it isn't, its not that good for rock either, which is simply to say its not that good.

Now it might be that you want more sound pressure or more bass. That will benefit classical recordings too. The thing is, humans all use the same hearing rules, so classical, jazz, folk, electronia, whatever- all has the same energy spread across the frequency range. So it takes more power in the bass and almost none at very high frequencies.