Good Speakers for Rock and Roll Under 15K

deep-33, why are you so antagonistic?  Most of us are here to learn and/or possibly help other people. Go flex your muscle somewhere else....

I was thinking last night that there might be alcohol involved.

I'm not the expert that is for sure, but I have definitely heard some speakers do it for me on rock that others do not.  But that is the great thing about this hobby is we have different flavors for people, even stuff that is imperfect may be someone's cup of tea.   I  have never heard Klipsch, with the exception of 1982 when I heard the big horns, I was just 14 years old so it was a long time ago but I thought they sound great with rock.  But back then I didn't have a reference to compare them with.  Anyway, aren't the Klipsch Cornwalls and Forte speakers supposed to sound great with rock?   

Can you measure dynamics and punch of a speaker?

@mofojo

Yes. There is something called ’thermal compression’ that has to do with the voice coil heating with bass notes and the like. When the voice coil heats, its harder for the amp to put current through it. The voice coil heats and cools with individual bass notes. So the result is less punch and its quite measurable.

The more efficient the speaker, the less this is a problem, generally speaking. You can do things on the design side like vented magnets to try to reduce this problem, but at the end of the day you tend to get more punch with more efficient speakers.

IMO/IME there really isn’t any reason to have a low efficiency speaker unless small size is really important. Higher efficiency speakers don’t take a back seat in terms of resolution, in fact can be more revealing. You do get into a problem making bass, and that can get expensive to overcome (for example TAD used to make the 15" 1602 driver, which was a good $2000 per driver, but were 97dB and had a free air resonance of 22Hz).

However, you can overcome the bass thing with subs. If you set up a distributed bass array, you can have good bass from 80Hz and down handled by the subs. Since each sub is handling only 1/4 of the total bass energy, they are less likely to get into thermal compression problems.