Does a speaker need to have many drivers or a large driver area to sound big and fill the room? I am asking this question because I have a pair of tekton design double impact and would like to replace them with smaller speakers and a pair of subwoofer's to better integrate the bass into my room. I just borrowed a set of B&W 702S. The are good but the just don't make that floor to ceiling sound that I like. Maybe I have already answered my own question (: But again I have not heard all the speakers out there. My room measure 15x19' and the ceiling goes from 7.5 to 12.8'
Big sound..... - Big speakers like the double impact (say no to bookshelf dinkies) - Concentrics if set up right since they can produce deep immersive holographic soundstages - dual subwoofers - Lots of wood diffusion panels on front and back walls - If you are not a 2 channel purist, set up a atmos/dts 5.2.2 system with front heights or 5.2.4 system (front and rear height speakers). Front heights should be atleast 2 to 3 ft above your fronts and 2 to 3 ft outside of front speakers. The big giant orchestra and humongous immersive 3D soundstages will show up in your lil room. Some very smart guys declared a while ago that 2 speakers (stereo) are not sufficient to replicate the acoustics of large venues and they were absolutely right. Science will give you big sound!!
In the car business there's a saying "there's no replacement for displacement" and while there are lots of technologically advanced turbo-4 engines these days that feel much closer to a bigger engine than their 2-liter displacements, a big engine still feels like a big engine. Similarly you can kind of predict how "big" a speaker sounds by the amount of driver surface area it has and thus the amount of air it is able to move. That being said, as others mentioned, for a given displacement some speakers will do a much better job of sounding big and full than others. I'm not sure I agree that it is about tweeter technology or dispersion pattern as much as it is about how the mid-bass response is tuned. That to me is the part of the spectrum that has the lion's share of the visceral musical material and can give a sense of ease and fullness to the presentation. So the choices the designer has made with regard to driver, crossover, enclosure, bass alignment etc. will factor in heavily. Often there is a tradeoff between damping and fullness that you have to balance carefully.
Some examples of smaller speakers that play big in my experience are the Sonus Faber Electa Amator, Silverline SR17 Supreme and Dynaudio Special Forty. They all have a slightly warmer mid-bass tuning and bass alignment that that isn't overdamped (in the case of the Dynaudio, I'd say quite a bit underdamped) that helps give a fullness and resonance that suggests a larger speaker. The Sonus Faber alone blew me away at RMAF 2018; add on a subwoofer (in that case a SF Gravis) and you have a huge, enveloping sound. I also recommend REL subwoofers as a good avenue to explore with a smaller speaker.
The final answer which on these threads is always, sub woofers. Sub woofers are like 400 watt amplifiers...why would you want more watts if the first watt sounds like crap. Why would you want to add subs to a system that sounds like crap..
I wouldn't really. In fact, I advocate full range speakers without any subwoofers, but sometimes it is not practical in terms of cost, space, aesthetics. So yes, big speakers, big high current amps, big turntables, and the right cables. Then it will sound big. Oh, and good recordings and wall current.
One factor no one has mentioned is the quality of the music coming from your source. Better quality source components can make the same music (whether from vinyl or digital) sound fuller and with more presence.
Amplifiers can also make the same speaker sound fuller in sound.
I had my custom moderate size listening room designed to accommodate 6-12" woofers at high efficiency, 98db. Now I get 25 Hz down just a few db. Bass is not an issue. This is very superior to my prior room which was 25' X 20' X 11.5' where I only got 35 Hz and bass response sounded heavy and uneven. The quality of the sound is 100% more satisfying/dense/rich with the same equipment. I also use acoustic tweaks including a double pair of Hallographs and a slew of SR HFTs, some ECTs and GCTs. I don't claim to get the best sound I ever heard but sound that one has difficulty leaving the room or running to the room to get to the music. I've heard 100s of systems over the years. The $1 million VAC/Von Schweikert system sounded the most life like. That system was large in a very large room but provided whatever the character of the recording, close or distant with all the ambiance that was recorded (or reverbed). It also provides a bubble of sound that emanates so that it spreads throughout the room, unlike most box speakers and many stats I've had. Advanced box speaker technology can rival any other tech design. It can be costly. I can make do for now with a great room and very good speakers that bring me to the music as it was recorded, near, far, in-between. Music can literally pop out at me, at all frequencies, just like live music at all levels of dynamics. Only orchestral music sounds compressed to some extent, often the recordings' fault as well.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I have this fast8 arriving in 2 weeks, I just surveyed several LII 10's and 8's on YT vids, ,,seems a tad warm in the critical mids,,But we'll see after i build the cabinets, Will uploada YT vid, Now to answer the OP, The answer he is looking for is ~~Sensitivity~~~ The Thors with 87db sound like a wet blanket 's been thrown over the speaker, LITERALLY!!!! Vs a relatively high sens at 91db FR Diatone 6.5 wide band. The Diatone 91db sounds bigger vs the MTM Thors, Go figure, db sens is everything in a speaker, Lower the db more ouny sounding speaker, higher the db la mas grande the image. Its that simple.
This thread keeps going...So here's another thought, not specific to the speakers the OP mentions.
(Again, the real answer is undistorted, real full range loudspeakers/subs. Size does not matter, but actually achieving the above sentence IS certainly easier with physically larger speakers. At least at lower cost.)
However, nobody SHOULD want big sounding speakers. I'll even go further. No one should want speakers to CREATE scale and sound big. A speaker reproducing stereo (almost by definition) should simply disappear!
Yes, room reflections, speaker style, on and on are important, but none exclusively provide or control auditory image-size and scale.
Let's back up. What is the recording? A piccolo solo? A floor to ceiling piccolo would be undesirable, even comical. A bumble bee buzzing around? Small, precise image flying around.
Two of the DIRECT causes of image-size and scale are 1) Volume and 2) the Recording itself.
If your speakers are making, "small things" big, you have a problem. Wiring a driver out-of phase and increasing the level (to that driver) could create an artificially huge image. Phil Specter's Wall of sound and many, many recording use the concept to successfully creat big, enveloping sound. Echo, reverb, phase are the tools engineers use daily to give your music scale! So the bottom line is: image size should be proportional to the recording. Your volume knob is your one real control--the louder, the larger things should sound. Magical recordings do it all: huge performance space, big scale, precise imaging, dynamic--the engineer gives you the majestic illusion of large sound. Thank him or her. Now go play with your knob.
Two of the DIRECT causes of image-size and scale are 1) Volume and 2) the Recording itself.
You forgot the most important one...
The only one that matter and which is under your control save the volume control trivial remark:
Controls of " timing" of early and late " reflected" wavefronts, and controls of the speakers characteristics by driving them through the pressure zones of your room with the addition of new pressure zones : Hemholtz resonators ORIENTED grid...
There is more than trivial volume control here...
And for sure if the recording engineer of the live event was a bad one, you will not replace the cd quality with acoustic... But this is trivial...
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