League For High Efficiency Loudspeakers

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I will happily join any league that is against the LS3/5A - a speaker that could only have been made popular in the heyday of the BBC. It is a deeply compromised design and exemplifies all the shortcomings of low efficiency speakers without actually being good!!!

It is however a great example of marketing and mass belief "The BBC says it is good so it must be".

I want a League Against the Hype!!!

The BBC LS3/5A was never intended to be mass marketed.
Its fame only grows slowly, because some people, having listened it in a professional environment, wanted to have a pair at home.
It became known through word of mouth, before being the object of moderate advertisements, not the hype you think of.
Note that its replacement, based on Dynaudio drivers, despite being BBC labelled, are forgotten since long.
 
Sreten, this aspect of audio reproduction is exactly where low
efficiency speakers, dare I mention LS3/5A, "excel at failing".

Hi,

It has been quite true for a long time that high efficiency
speakers tend to have lower THD for a given SPL level.

If you like it loud don't choose the low efficiency route.

How ever this at about 86dB/W I doubt "excels at failing" :
https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/tarkus
Quite the opposite with 30 to 100 good watts I imagine.

rgds, sreten.
 
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Hi,

It has been quite true for a long time that high efficiency
speakers tend to have lower THD for a given SPL level.

If you like it loud don't choose the low efficiency route.

How ever this at about 86dB/W I doubt "excels at failing" :
https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/tarkus
Quite the opposite with 30 to 100 good watts I imagine.

rgds, sreten.

How about those Apogee speakers, with even lower efficiency. I never heard those myself, but those who have them like the sound.
 
A couple of years ago, I was on the high-eff bandwagon. But what I've realized since then is that good sound does not depend on efficiency. High efficiency is not necessarily better. There are trade-offs. There are other priorities. All we can really say is: all things being equal, higher efficiency is better.
 
How about those Apogee speakers, with even lower efficiency. I never heard those myself, but those who have them like the sound.
I did hear a set of Apogee Scintillas once in a good room with a lovely Mark Levinson amp and MIT and other expensive cables. The CD player was Levinson also? Don't remember for sure.

Playing some jazz music, it really did sound like a window into a room where the musicians were playing.

Also there were some plastic diaphragm speakers, driven like ripples by a voice coil in the middle of the membrane...who the heck was that guy...it is on the tip of my brain, AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH...more known for electronics...
 
Friends, we can have all sorts of sidetrack discussions, nothing wrong with that, but what I would like to know/see the proof or data...is that low efficiency loudspeakers, given the same spl and frequency range, simply do not produce the same detailed dynamic sound as highly efficient speakers.

Some time ago mass asembly in china lead to big voice coil gap, which would require less quality control and lower defect rejection. Ultimately we have low efficiency loudspeakers...

That is an interesting theory. As a loudspeaker engineer, I would have said that the trend towards smaller and smaller speakers means the death of efficiency due to Hoffman's Iron Law. But I cannot refute what you are saying, either. I will have to see if I can track down a guy I know who was chief engineer for one of the biggest and best known Chinese speaker factories, and ask him about your hypothesis. I can say there is at least some amount of truth about that.
 
Friends, we can have all sorts of sidetrack discussions, nothing wrong with that, but what I would like to know/see the proof or data...is that low efficiency loudspeakers, given the same spl and frequency range, simply do not produce the same detailed dynamic sound as highly efficient speakers.

If low efficiency loudspeakers objectively lack of dynamics, it implies that they suffer from some kind of compression, as it has been said. However without data to support the assertion.

It is quite logical that people liking high efficiency loudspeakers like high listening SPL. As high SPLs flatten equal loudness contours, a more detailed sound is perceived. Not due the high efficiency of the loudspeakers but to a well known mechanism of auditive perception
(see curve below).

It is also a bit contradictory that those who argue of the lack of compression of high efficiency loudspeakers show a clear preference for high listening levels with of a kind a music which is already heavily compressed. Note that compression of drivers have much longer thermal time constants than the compression used at the recording stage and does not generate audible distortion.

To me, a fair comparison at identical SPL between low and high efficiency loudspeakers having similar frequency range should not made at the same distance.

600px-Lindos1.svg.png
 
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sreten - if you're talking about the Carver Amazing Loudspeakers, I seem to recall them using an array of more or less conventional moving coil woofers with customized T/S parameters, and a full length ribbon tweeter - a rather novel combination at the time, certainly in their price range (something like $2500 CDN, circa early -mid 1990's?)


At nominal 88dB SPL, they would certainly fail the LALEL entry exam

An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


There was in circulation around that time a demo CD that included the famous "garage door track" - these guys were absolutely scarily realistic on that track, on much highly processed studio pop music, less so I found.
 
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forr, I don't normally listen to music at high SPL.

I prefer high efficiency speakers on principal of requiring less power, and producing lower distortion.

My speakers (Vintage Klipsch Heresy) are 96dB/W-m, which is on the low end of 'High Efficiency'.
 
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