speakers for classical music

I second Atma-Sphere's endorsement of Classic Audio Reproductions speakers. Tonal balance is excellent, as is inner detail, and they seem to have no dynamic limitations. They convey the emotion of the music extremely well, presumably by preserving the dynamic contrast that the musicians use to convey that emotion.

At CES a few years ago my wife and I made the rounds along with my brother and his wife, and the only room where the two ladies just started dancing to the music was was the Classic Audio Reproductions room. Okay that's not exactly a precise measurement of loudspeaker quality, but it was an honest one. I've also observed my own butt spontaneously shaking when in the Classic Audio Reproductions room, and I've seen some serious air guitar playing in there as well. I have no doubt that with classical music they would be superb - probably inducing air bowing, or whatever classical listeners do when they think one is watching. They are speakers that you can totally get lost in the music with.

Classic Audio Reproductions changed my thinking about loudspeakers in two regards: Before hearing them for the first time, I thought that horns couldn't sound natural, and I thought that vented boxes couldn't do tight bass. Designer John Wolff really, really knows what he's doing.

Duke

At the risk of redundancy, let me suggest taking a look at the paper Atma-Sphere linked to:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

Briefly, different amplifier types behave differently when they see a non-resistive loudspeaker load. Most solid state amps approximate a constant-voltage source, and these are the ones who double their wattage output into 4 ohms and halve their output into 16 ohms. Many tube amps approximate a constant-power source, putting out roughly the same wattage into 4, 8 and 16 ohms.

So, let's assume our nominally 8-ohm speaker has a 32-ohm impedance peak in the crossover region. With a drive level that equals 1 watt output into 8 ohms, a solid state amp will put out 1/4 watt into that impedance peak, while a tube amp will put out four times as much power (1 watt) into that impedance peak. So the tonal balance will change significantly depending on amplifier type, and which type of amp works best depends on what the speaker designer had in mind.

Speakers whose impedance curves are very smooth (Maggies come to mind) work well with either type of amp, provided it is powerful enough.

The argument in favor of zero global feedback, soft-clipping, class A tube amps is a more complicated one, and probably doesn't belong in this thread.

Long story short: Amplifier to loudspeaker matching matters. If this is a subject that's important to you, check out that paper.

Duke

Shadorne, that JBL paper where they compared the thermal compression of different woofers and the Alnico magnet TAD compressed by about 7 dB within a few seconds is grossly misleading. I hate to say this about the JBL guys, but they deliberately chose test conditions that made their competition look very very bad.

Alnico has less loss of magnetic flux with heating than ceramic does, up until the point that you overheat it. Then, Alnico loses flux permanently; it becomes partially de-magnetized, whereas a ceramic magnet will regain its flux once it cools off.

What JBL did was to overheat the Alnico magnet. They damaged it, and I doubt that was accidental. That test is not an accurate depiction of how an Alnico magnet performs when it is not abused.

Duke