Best moderately priced speakers for classical music

It’s not that a speaker is designed for a specific genre---all speakers should be designed and engineered to reproduce the signal they are fed. It’s that different genres of music CAN reveal weakness in a speaker that another genre is less likely to reveal. I’ll say it again: read what Ken Kantor said about how different aspects of reproduced music are effected differently by various speakers depending on the weighting of priorities chosen by the speaker’s designer. ALL loudspeakers are the culmination of compromises and design choices made by their designers.

As an extreme example, if you listen exclusively to, say, string quartet music, a speaker than can reproduce that music very well may not necessarily be able to reproduce a full symphony orchestra as well as it can the quartet. A speaker than makes a good recording of a Bluegrass group sound very much like the group does live---say the old Quad---might be unable to do the same for an AC/DC recording.

The fact is, one "kind" of music may make more obvious the weaknesses in or limitations of a speaker than may another. The ability of a speaker to keep the individual threads of notes played simultaneously by four harpsichords (as in J.S. Bach’s incredible Concerto for 4 Harpsichords and Orchestra) separate from each other is a very different task than is reproducing the lowest pedal note (16Hz) of a pipe organ, or Jimi Hendrix’s (note spelling ;-) Strat into a Marshall stack at 105dB (believe me, live it was not a "pretty" sound---kind of like chewing foil!).

I just received the new issue of PS Audio’s in-house electronic magazine "Copper", number 89. If you don’t receive it, you should!

In his first article for Copper, speaker designer Ken Kantor (everybody knows who he is, right?) broaches the very topic of speaker design as it relates to musical genres. Here is part of what he had to say on that subject:

"The way I see it, there are many aspects of sound, many realms of subjective impression, many kinds of specifications and measurements, that prove to have different weights of importance to the reproduction of different musical genres."

Bingo! That is exactly the point I have tried to make every time I join a discussion about the subject, but Ken has done it far better than I. If you care to, reread what he had to say on the subject. Get it?

While I have your attention, allow me to repeat a quote with which Ken began his article: "I’d rather play Jazz, I hate Rock and Rock"---Ginger Baker. Every time the subject of The Best Rock ’n’ Roll Drummers Of All Time comes up, rarely is Ginger not included in the list. Can a drummer who hates Rock and Roll none-the-less be one of it’s best practitioners? I don’t know, but in this case it’s academic; Ginger is NOT a Rock ’n’ Roll drummer. Neither is Neil Peart.

I hope we all agree Chuck Berry is not just A Rock ’n’ Roll guitarist (and songwriter, and singer), but arguably THE Rock ’n’ Roll guitarist; the one guitarist without whom there would be no Rock ’n’ Roll guitar playing as we know it. I just watched a short (under 5 minutes if you’re time is very valuable) video on You Tube in which Dave Edmunds (my all-time favorite Rock ’n’ Roll guitarist, by far) tells an interviewer about the time he was hired to assemble and lead a band for Chuck at Chuck’s 60th birthday party. Dave enlisted Terry Williams (Head, Hands, & Feet, Rockpile, Carlene Carter, Dire Straits---a great, great drummer), keyboardist Chuck Leavell (The Stones, Clapton, Allman Brothers, many others), and on bass John Entwistle. Now, Dave obviously considers Entwistle a great bassist (as do I, one of the greatest I’ve seen live), but a little while into the set, after John felt comfortable enough, he started playing, as Dave put it, "a little busy". Chuck walked over to Entwistle and said to him, "Don’t do that." !

That reminds me of the story recounted to me by Evan Johns, a story I have yet to tire of repeating. Evan’s former bandmate and close friend, the incomparably great guitarist Danny Gatton, had just hired a new drummer. On the break after the first set (most working musicians play multiple sets a night) on his first gig, Danny approached the drummer, and the following exchange took place:

Danny to the drummer: "Hey, you know all that fancy sh*t you play?"

The drummer: "Yeah."

Danny: "Don’t."