When choosing new Speakers, what matters most to you?

tomic601

No. All I have is pictures of both those Z-28’s. I bought the first one with paper route money and drove it to high school. That 302 cu in engine made a lot of noise but was only a 14 second car. So, I talked my dad into letting me buy a crate engine.. a 427/430 L-88 and install in that car. Before it was over it had 4.88 gears, Hayes aluminum flywheel, Lakewood traction bars, Hooker Headers. Can you imagine letting your kid drive that animal to HS? It ran 11.88 @ 116 and in its day, on those little tires it was a wicked SOB.. The hardest part to believe is a paper route had the buying power to purchase such neat things. We grew up in the best of times, didn’t we?

I thought GM used 305' cu in , Ford the 302. I had a 68 SS 396 Camaro. 

djones51

Only the 67-69 Z-28s Chevrolets Camaro used this "Special High Performance" engine package. It was intended to cement their advantaging in the SCCA Road Racing Series that required no more than 305 cu. in. maximums. Chevrolet used a 283 Crankshaft with a 350 cu in Bore. This combination came out 302. The short stroke, big bore package was much faster revving and accelerating than their 305 engines that were made for street cars. They also incorporated a Duntov 30/30 solid lifter camshaft and underrated it (deliberately) to 290 HP so the young kids buying them could afford the insurance cost.

Hope this cleans up your confusion

@imhififan, I can put 20.7s in a closet and make then sound good. The only limit on speaker size is the width of the door. Computer speakers in a department store will certainly not work well.

Specifications and measurements are two entirely separate issues. Specifications can lie, measurements do not. How many of you out there in Audiogon Land actually measure your systems? 

A loudspeaker's design will tell you a lot about how it functions in certain respects. It will not tell you how it sounds.

A loudspeaker will sound different in two different rooms because the rooms sound different.

In thinking about my own experience, I just bought a new pair of loudspeakers and I had never been in the same room with a pair. Not only this but I had them built to a specification that had never been done before. Fortunately, they are performing beyond all expectation. I have done similar experiments before resulting in total failure. Experience is the best teacher. In truth I have had decades of experience with similar loudspeakers so I knew exactly how they would perform. This is determined by the physical characteristics of the speaker. I was not worried about how they sounded because I can make them sound however I like. But, if a speaker can not image no amount of monkeying around is going to get it to do so.

You have to determine what you expect out of a loudspeaker and  the physical characteristics such a speaker should have. The way a speaker images, the size of it's sound stage, the way it radiates sound are not accidental. They are by design.

A speaker's frequency response will vary wildly from one room to the next. In this day and age with DSP amplitude, time and phase are easy to deal with. You measure and tell the computer what you want it to do. 

Expectations are different. I expect a system to be able to simulate the sound and sensations of a live performance given the right program source and with any genre. A system that struggles to get down to 40 Hz can not do this. It is missing an entire octave!  3dB down at 40 Hz/1 meter is 10 dB down at 4 meters. So much for bass. Only line source arrays produce life sized images and they are inherently more efficient radiators of sound into the environment. They sound more powerful. The room is much less important to a line source dipole. They radiate in a very specific and predictable pattern and positioned correctly have far less interaction with the room. You hear more of the music and less of the room. Only horns are as predictable. 

How amenable to modification. Its a mystery to me how few speakers optimized by factory.

Simple for me, I want real live, flesh and blood performers in my room.