Efficient speakers -- What was your journey from A to B to ?

This is an interesting thread about higher efficiency speakers.  It is indeed the case that most horn systems do not have great time alignment of drivers.  However, if the speaker is designed properly, this in not really much of a problem.  The trick is to have a wide range horn driver so that frequencies from 500 hz on up to around 5,000 hz or slightly higher are handled by the horn driver.  A single driver covering this critical range will make the speaker sound coherent, clear, and the drivers can be made to sound well blended.  As mentioned above, the tricky part is getting a woofer with decent efficiency to match the other high efficiency drivers.  There are woofers that can do this and are fast enough to work up to higher frequencies, but, they do, like all drivers, have their tradeoffs--most have low excursion so they don't do truly deep bass even when they are very large in diameter, most require a fairly large cabinet, and modern versions of such woofers are hard to find.

Also mentioned above is the use of active crossover and powered woofer to mate with the more efficient driver(s).  For example, I like the Cube Audio Nenuphar Basis system that employs their fullrange driver plus a powered woofer; to me it sound more natural and tonally balanced than their fullrange only systems.

I mentioned, and so did others, the Charney Audio speakers.  To be specific, I heard their Companion model with both the Voxativ and AER fullrange driver options (they have others).  I liked both drivers a lot, but, my preference was for the AER driver.  Pure Audio Project speakers are also modular systems with different options for their midrange/high frequency drivers.  I've heard their terrific sounding speakers with both a horn-based module and a coaxial driver; both sounded very good.  I have not heard the much more expensive module utilizing a Voxativ field coil driver, but, I've heard that driver in other systems and really liked its immediate, very dynamic sound.

My very favorite high efficiency speakers are custom systems utilizing new and very vintage drivers made by Deja Vu Audio in Northern Virginia.  This is a retail store that also makes speakers, tube amplifiers (linestages, preamps, phono stages), and even DACs (no longer made for lack of suitable parts).  Their systems typically feature vintage midrange horns and compression drivers matched to modern tweeters and custom woofers (woofers made to their specific requirements).  For some of their very best systems, modern manufactured drivers that are meant to be exact copies of vintage Western Electric drivers are used and their own custom built tube power supplies are used for these field coil drivers.  Right now, their most popular custom speaker utilizes a surprisingly small cabinet to house an 18" woofer (modern, custom design), a modern bullet tweeter, and a terrific sounding Japanese folded horn and compression drivers (probably from the 1960's); this is a scary good system that is a bargain at the $35,000 price they charged.  For my particular taste, I like them much more than contemporary horn systems like JBL Everests, and Klipshorn, Volti, or even the Edgarhorn systems that I've heard.

Coherent Audio built on Radian coaxial drivers are great speakers.

I listened to their model 18 a couple of times on the Montreal Audio Show. These speakers are really easy to drive. Actually the 300B SET did it very easily and the sound filled a big room.

In contrast, a modern JBL and Tannoy are designed for transistor amplifiers that have a heavy bass driver that don't afford them to work well on low volume and with small power amplification.

I've tried a whole bunch of efficient speakers since realizing that conventional speakers lose something in translation.  Avantgarde horns are the ones for me - they make everything else sound likes cones-in-a-box.  They are so awesome that two of my buddies sold their speakers (Wilson Sophia and Focal Utopia Be) to replace them with Avantgardes.  They couldn't go back to listening to their systems after hearing mine, and all three of us hopped off the gear-go-round after getting them, which says it all.

Not sure if this has been covered here but its important to realize efficient does not mean easy load. Not easy load means not just any amp will do to get the best performance possible.

Nothing wrong with any of the speakers mentioned as long as proper amp matching is done.

I have gone through similar gyrations considering "more efficient" speakers. But more efficient just means louder not better. For better, you want speakers that are easy to drive with any amp, and that would be Fritz speakers. There may be others but those are ones I know, have heard and can vouch for the fact that they will perform well and go reasonably loud even with most any amp. I heard them with a flea powered tube amp at Capital Audiofest a few years back and was won over.

Having said that, teh best high efficiency speaker sound I recall ever hearing was with a pair of large custom goto horns at the very first ever Capital Audiofest years back. Others I have not heard that I would love to be able to audition but have very low WAF are Jadis Eurythmie and Avantgarde. I’m sure there are others. I tend to always like Klipsch Heritage speakers when I hear those and would consider those to be very good relative values worth consideration. Volti as well. Have heard and liked Spatial as well but not sure if those qualify as truly high efficiency.

Mapman,

I heard the Goto speakers at the same first Capital Audiofest.  It was indeed a nice sounding horn system, but Goto systems are wildly impractical (giant, straight throated horns) in terms of size and price (more than most people's homes for just the drivers).  Goto and another company ALE make good compression drivers.  Both are companies whose engineers came from Yoshimura Laboratories (YL), a company that was itself dedicated to making drivers to sound like Western Electric compression drivers.  Goto and ALE diverged a bit from YLin that their approach to improving the compression driver meant the driver covered a narrower frequency band.  When it comes to midrange compression drivers, I tend to like older, vintage drivers, like the Western Electric, YL, International Projector Company, and Racon, and the current Japanese company G.I.P. Laboratories which clones Western Electric field coil compression drivers; I don't know of modern compression drivers that perform as well.