Reasonably sensitive speakers for tube amps, max $2k/pair, new or used


While this topic has been covered before, I'm interested in both recent experiences with new products or anyone who just would like to chime in.

I have a couple friends interested in tube amps, lower wattage -- 40 wpc or below. Before they pull the trigger there, they need to find the best higher sensitivity speakers they can, hopefully at $2k or below, new or used.

QUESTION: What high sensitivity speakers would you recommend to them, new or used? What did you try and NOT like?
Characterizations of their sound, experience with a trial period, the company, etc. appreciated.

I'll pass the best answers and links along to them.
128x128hilde45

Showing 4 responses by jjss49

@hilde45

@tvad a top authority on this subject, i don’t have much to add to his thoughts, which i agree with -- all of the named speakers have what i hear as troublesome colorations or other issues that rule themselves out for me, despite them all also having some clear strengths

only thing to add is that fritz’s speakers, while not that efficient nominally, work quite well with lower powered amps - i know you are quite familiar with those as you have had them... but not sure if you tried them with silky smooth flea watters...

also... search out on earlier threads for writings by @bjesien and @phd (iirc) on their thoughts on omegas
The thing is, the really good-sounding high-sensitivity speakers start a bit over 2K.

@twoleftears is being kind here... i would say 5-6k might be a minimum... as usual it is all about where one sets the bar for ’good sounding’

as for tekton, my personal take is i would tend to discount one-off input from folks here bashing the person behind what is otherwise a respected and well known maker... anyone who has been around a consumer retail luxury good business knows that there can always be a small percentage of folks and instances where getting along and making them happy may be nigh impossible... a function of circumstances, demands being made, an off-day by the owner (they are people too) etc etc...
perhaps it is obvious to most here, but for those less knowledgeable, let’s review why the world isn’t populated with home and room friendly $1500 a pair speakers at 95 db/w/m efficiency that sound just wonderful...

when you make a speaker more and more efficient, you use lightweight transducers or horn shaped ’magnifiers’ to get the additional output or ’loudness’ -- but you get it primarily in the midband and lower treble... so you then need to deal with the lack of bass, and the lightweight transducers being less stiff and hard to control once they are moving...

so then, to get better bass, you need a big big cabinet (that’s why many ’good’, e.g. well balanced top to bottom speakers are very very large)... many also try cabinet porting, but then there are difficult port issues to deal with when alot of air is moving on bass passages, so then you damp the port to control that, but then you lose efficiency again... doh!!!

lighter transducers can be solved with high tech materials, but you still need power to move the voice coils via magnet structures, and you tend to want smaller lighter magnet structures but you use those and they often overshoot... thus more distortion, especially on complex music... doh...

horn magnifiers have their own type of wave propogation distortion, highlighting imbalances in frequency response of the driver they are magnifying... which then in turn take a lot of skill and cost to tune properly, as room conditions in home applications can vary considerably

due to the above, it is very very very hard to build a well integrated top of bottom speaker that is high efficiency and of a reasonable size, and has bass response we want ... and this is why even good high efficiency speakers tend to sound a little more ’peaky’/’ragged’ than counterparts of equal cost and quality but lower efficiency

so all this is a long way of saying, let’s understand what the industry has been dealing with here -- it is basically a tough physics problem -- and with cheaper clean amplification becoming available over time with solid state amps, this is why the industry took the route of reducing efficiency to get a more ’flat’ and bass impactful sound out of domesticated speakers.... and we can of course argue speaker makers went too far off course in that direction as well

so if it were so easy to make super great sounding high efficiency speakers that can satisfy us and look passable in our homes, easily driven by sweetie pie 8 wpc single ended 300b amps -- they would be flooding the market, and we would all have them...
+1 re buchardts... great performance for the modest cost

re spatials, one must be careful not to generalize... the tonality of older vs current gen spatials have changed considerably... the new (current) line uses much more lively tweeters which make the presentation (at least the highs) much more upfront than the older gen m4, triode masters, what have you... big big difference --- so you read folks writing about how incredible the m3 sapphires of x5s are, then you go get a pair of the old ones, you will certainly experience massive cognitive dissonance 😱😱