We should reject hard-to-drive speakers more often

I’m pretty sure speaker designers go for sound quality first and end up with hard to drive speakers. I was a long term fan and owned electrostatic and ribbon speakers (Acoustat, Apogee)… I was happy with the journey… and owned several enormous heavy and expensive amps.

If one doesn’t like hard to drive speakers, it’s pretty easy not to buy them.

Over the last 40 or so years I have found that I gravitate towards low efficiency speakers with silk tweeters. Those sound best to me. Yes, it is sometimes a pain to get a good match for these as they require gobs of current, but at the same time that is where the ‘magic’ lies to my ears.

I also realize that this was most likely click-bait, but a fun topic none-the-less.

It is good that we are now in a time when we have almost limitless choices in this hobby. The downside is that there are relatively few places any longer to go to hear these choices.

Enjoy the music everyone, and have a good weekend.

Since I got the Hegel H390, I haven’t found a speaker it can’t drive, but I really can’t speak for the thousands of speakers I haven’t tried yet.

@ghdprentice 

My Acoustat Model X’s come with forty watt mono blocks that have more than enough oomph to power them full bandwidth and with a crossover set at 100 hz, and a sub or two, it’s crazy good! 

@erik_squires 

Your reference to hard to drive Infinity Speakers brings back memories of my first "high end" purchase. In the early 70's I was at a hi-fi store in Palo Alto. They had the Infinity 2000A Electrostatic speakers (4 Ohm) on display playing a Cat Stevens album. To my young and naive ears they sounded spectacular. I don't know what amplifier they were using, but it was probably top quality, better than my Sherwood receiver at 60 watts a channel. I scraped up the money and bought the Infinity's. They sounded great even though my Sherwood was probably struggling to drive them. About a year later I traded them in, the speaker's power cords were quite inconvenient in my small apartment.