grills or no grills on your speakers..matters?

Depends on the speaker and the grill. Off for most for sound..looks are secondary unless you date porn stars. Then it's grills off.

Polk432 has it right. It depends on the system, the speaker, the grill.

For headphones, grills off. Definitely.

In my case, I have the Sonus Faber Evolutions with the cool string grilles so for me...its grilles on all the way! Looks are all that matters, for speakers and porn stars! :)

1) When I'm being taken away from all that ails me in this world via my system, I don't see the speakers, so the question is moot.
2) My speakers didn't come with grills, so again, moot.
3) If I had speakers with grills, just the thought that the grills would interfer with the sound would be enough for me to loose them.

All the best,
Nonoise

What do you think???? Who gives a sh#^! what I think?

I have Harbeths and the grills are not removable per Harbeth! They were designed with the grills on!

music on? grills off.
actually, I've gotten so lazy that the grills are always off and in storage now. ;^)

Depends on the speakers. The Aerials in my bedroom have the grills on, the Meadowlark Kestrels in the listening room are sans grills. This is done based on listening preference.

I agree, depends on the speakers. 9 out of 10 times I prefer no grills.

this depends on the speaker designer's intentions. I have Vandersteen who strongly recommends them on - the grills are a part of the performance design as well as aesthetics.

Depends on the speakers. When I had the original Dyn C1's they sounded much better with the grills off (soundstage got wider and ever so slightly clearer sounding). Then I upgraded to the C1 Signatures and the grills on or off made very little difference. I usually left them on the Sig's to keep the dust off the drivers. My current speakers have no grills.

In my case I have always found that the music sounds better with the grills off. When I remove the grills it sounds like a veil has been removed and I'm a bit closer to hearing the music a bit clearer.
If I owned a speaker where that was not the case I would deffinately leave the grills on.

My Kharmas seem to sound better with the grills, so I leave them on all the time

Grills off, clothes off.

I'm answering this question so I will be recognized as a sage

Grills off

Grills muffle sound HELLO!!!!!!

Grills on for me.

Grills muffle sound… most speakers would sound so much better with much more mufffffling…..

Lets hear it for muffffffling…..

The grill frames are often worse than the cloth itself.

In general the sound is diminished by cloth in the sonic pathway with the exception of low bass.

Q

Strongly depends on the speaker. Vienna Acoustics pays particular attention to the design of their grills for use on or off. In some case, they say the sound could benefit with them on and the enthusiast should experiment thusly. Isn't that part of the fun of this hobby?

90% of my listening is done with the grills on.

It's kinda innerestin' that acoustically transparent grills could interfere so much. Now, I'm not saying that there's no difference...

I use a pair of Silverline Preludes with grills off, but the sound is still pretty good with them on (parties, fear of driver poking). I have a beef with much of the speaker design world in that some drivers are very fragile and can be easily dented...Magico tweeters...how happy would you be if some party goer stuck their finger in that tweeter? My Preludes have screens over the tweets so I worry less, but still...some protection for these things seems appropriate and should be designed in somehow without sonic penalties.

Just removed mine this evening for the first time in a long time to see if there was a difference. No difference in the sound quality. Leaving them on to keep the dust off the drivers.

I keep the tops off and the bottoms on now while listening. Wilson Witt series II. The Lipinski L707's were always run with the grills off. They don't even cover the tweeters on their speakers. I run an Orick Air Purifier to keep the dust down in the listening room.

Wolf-Garcia, I believe my Preludes do better than any other speakers I've owned with grills on.

Most Subs with grills off will make your system come alive.

If your system has been set up to a threshold level of accuracy and retail resolution, then removal of the grills will definitely improve things enough that you will want to take them off. I am still using a pair of Snell B Type full-range 5-sided speakers since 1993 and have tried them on and off in my system as it evolved. I never was able to hear a difference until this year when I finally got the message about isolation platforms for every component and power supply and proper cable separation. Only after giving every component its own maple platform sitting on iso-blocks and an assortment of brass footers, Terra Stones, Herbie's Rollers, etc. gleaned from the used market, was I able to actually hear more detail when the covers were off and to crave it when they are on. Until you address the system set-up issues that lower the noise floor that interferes with the low-level details, the difference might be inaudible to you as it was for me until I finally got my system to basic fundamental audio set-up integrity.

I really don't need the grills on my Preludes as they do have screens on the tweeters...I dust the woofers from time to time as tiny dust particles do not deserve to ride around on my drivers. I put new grill cloth on my sub as it had been damaged by the previous owner, and I can't imagine it blocking anything under its 50 hz or so frequency range...so it stays.

I'll add that when my grills are off and people come to visit, they're drawn to the speakers like a magnet (no pun intended). With grills on, they sit down or head to the kitchen because they known where I keep the scotch.

Grills on. My pet hamster crawled into the bass reflex tube. The devil to pay to get him out.

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Always off when home alone. Always on when I have guests.
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Bifwynne, that reminded me of a friend who lost a pet boa constrictor. He searched everywhere with no luck. Thought it may have gotten outside, so he notified the neighbors to be on the look out for it, and that it was pretty much harmless. Then one day he was moving his JBL L100's (grills were removed) had felt something funny with one of them. He removed the bass driver and found his snake. It crawled in through the bass reflex tube towards the warmth.

Good story $2.80 Change my last response -- grills off! :)

NEXT!!

Grills are always off except when company is over. Sounds best to me that way. I don't want anyone touching the drivers.

Instead of grills, I've found that a small electric barbed wire fence around my speakers can keep the drivers safe...I found that using a moat full of piranhas was simply not practical, and the cats kept disappearing.

Removed the grill cloth from my Hales Revelation Three recently and the speakers were reborn IMO. I figured that 30 years worth of dust embedded in the cloth covering my drivers would prove to be detrimental to good sound...

Grills On only for parties. If you can't hear the difference, then your system may needs upgrade!