High Efficiency Speakers Your top 3 or more

Funny story - when I had a Trio audition it was so bad I felt compelled to feign death in order to escape. To make the sale convincingly I popped a drug that lowered my heart rate and respiration to almost imperceptible levels - and woke up just as the autopsy was starting!!

But I got out of the rest of that Run DMC album.

The Lamhorn is very good - can be forward.

The Beauhorn is also very good, quite a bit smoother, but less heft.

Of course neither of these have any real highs (and if you 'throw in a super-tweeter' you're now building your own speaker).

Devore are great speakers but they are really not high-eff in any sense, though they will play on a 300B.

Klipsch can sound decent but the people who say they are mid-fi speakers stock do have a point.

The various Fostex backloaded horns have beguiling qualities but I have not heard one that did not have some forwardness/peakiness issues.

The Audio Note AN/Es are very special and will play decently on a 45 SET. Unfortunately in a great many rooms it is nearly impossible to get smooth bass in the corners and out of the corners the bass reach is quite compromised.

The Tonian speakers are absolute, pure genius.

I owned AN/Es (HE Kit 3s - basically equivalent to the factory SpE HE) and TL-D1s together for several months and went back and forth between them often. I think I can speak to their differences pretty well.

The Tonians are significantly faster and more open-sounding - they have a way with microdynamic finesse, esp. with percussion, I have basically not heard exceeded. Spellbinding.

The AN/Es had significantly lower bass as well as quite a bit more midbass energy. I also thought timbre was slightly better. Although the Tonians are never, ever shouty, being completely smooth and balanced, perhaps the AN/Es hemp driver gave slightly better harmonic density.

Although I preferred the Tonians for jazz I felt the AN/E was the slightly more well-rounded speaker.

Then I realized neither was really ideal for my huge room

The Avantgarde speakers (especially the Trio) can be quite good *when setup right* and everything gels.

But the best hi-effeciency speaker - and the best speaker, period - that I have ever heard is the Cogent horn system with their field-coil compression drivers. There is no beating that system. Of course the cost is also staggering.

Shame on you all for not mentioning this speaker.

Mapman, driving a speaker with a class D amp does not mean that you get the liveliness and emotive capability that high-efficiency speakers seem to bring. The point of HE is more than just drivability. And, while in general ICE, Tripath, and other chip amps are VERY good for the money they are still missing some of what SETs do. IME.

I had reminded myself to mention Daedalus in this thread and it slipped my mind. These are indeed excellent speakers, some of the best around, and they are indeed SET-compatible, but perhaps only higher-power SET.

I had an older pair of DA1s which I drove with a Viva Solista 845 SET as well as an ASR Emitter. The far greater power of the Emitter (and much lower damping factor) was really only evident at very high levels (much louder than I would normally listen).

Both combos were really, really, really good but I think I preferred the SET for that utterly pure midrange.

Lou says the current speakers are an easier load and thus even more friendly to no/low feedback tube amps.

Lou does really seem to like SS amps and I can only speculate that he likes music quite loud or prefers some other aspect(s) of transistor amps because they are very suitable for big SE transmitter triodes at least. I think a 300B would likely be marginal - despite the sensitivity I would think all those drivers draw some current.