The two most common mistakes are bass and treble


OK, so I know many of you will have a knee jerk reaction to that with something like "well you've just covered most of the spectrum!" but I mean to say more than what I can fit in a headline.

When first purchasing speakers the biggest regrets, or sometimes bad choices without regret, is looking for a speaker that is too detailed. In the store over 10 minutes it mesmerizes you with the resolution of frequencies you thought you would never hear again.  You take the speakers home and after a month you realize they are ear drills.  High pitched, shrill sounding harpies you can't believe you listened to long enough to make a choice.

The other mistake, which audiophiles life with far too long is buying too big a speaker for the room.  The specmanship of getting 8 more Hertz in the -3dB cutoff is a huge factor in speaker purchases.

What do you think the biggest mistakes are when buying speakers?
erik_squires

Showing 3 responses by pesky_wabbit

Forget the specs and judge each speaker on its merits. Use them only as a very broad guide to room matching and amplifier selection. Even then you sometimes get surprising outcomes that shouldn’t work well on paper.
I’m coming from the perspective of engineering and as an amplifier manufacturer of the last 45 years

Within a specific power envelope ?

The other problem you deal with is of course that you get thermal compression if the speaker lacks efficiency. You can’t solve this by getting a more powerful amp

No, you can solve it by various aspects of speaker driver and crossover designi. I don‘t think anyone could state that the ATC SCM50 (85db/W/m) suffers unduly from thermal compression. There are many other manufacturers who are cognisant of the impacts of thermal compression and design their drive units accordingly.
Another prime example are my original Acoustic Energy AE1‘s, which are notoriously inefficient, but were designed specifically to combat thermal compression, having their voice coils thermally bonded to the aluminium speaker cones to dissipate heat.

They sound atrocious cold, and really need a bit of warming up before they begin to sound good; sounding better the harder you drive them. They love heat. Their lack of compression at high levels is quite astonishing, even today, and makes nonsense of the idea that thermal compression has to be a limiting factor in low efficiency speakers. Their ultimate performance is mainly constrained by the driving amplifier.