Why are speakers rarely satisfactory?

@kenjit,

"The vast majority of audiophiles spend decades or even their entire life searching for speakers that sound right. All of us on this forum are searching for that perfect sound. You would think that out of all the different speakers out there, there would be one that meets a persons requirements. So why are most audiophiles rarely satisfied?
There are literally hundreds of speakers on the market. Surely one of those would very closely match the preferred frequency response being sought, so what is going on here?"


Mechanical (physical) signal processing tends to be far less accurate than its electrical (atomic) equivalent.

Hence loudspeakers exhibit many many times more distortion than the rest of the components (cables, pre amps, power amps, CD players, DACs, network devices, streamers etc) all added together.

Most of us realise that no loudspeaker sounds like real life. They all try to fool us into believing that we are listening to a real performance, but we can always tell that we're not.

It's accepted that there is no such as a perfect loudspeaker and all of them to some degree or another attempt to hide their sonic deficiencies.

All of them.

Some even jettison the entire bass end of the frequency, whilst others deliberately lower resolution to avoid further exposing their own weaknesses.

So it's hardly surprising that they're not altogether satisfactory. However since we audiophiles all desire greater sonic satisfaction, we keep on looking for incremental improvements and hopefully learning something along the way.

As far as I know no one has ever attempted to build a perfect loudspeaker, and who knows what would it even look like?

Can you imagine a single point, omni-directional, full bandwidth design with zero distortion?

Is even this £200k+ effort from MBL getting anywhere near?

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/mbl-101-x-treme-omnidirectional-loudspeaker/

@sjeesjie,

’I’m probably the only one but I thought it was a good question.’


Fear not, it is a certainly a good question, and one that needs an answer. No amount of derision can alter that fundamental point.

Anyone is free to respond if they feel they have something worthwhile to contribute.

That’s what forums are for aren’t they? Asking questions and looking for answers, instead of surreptitious attempts to steer currency toward the path of various financial parties.

It’s probably the key question for anyone new to audio to be asking before mistakenly embarking on a futile lifelong pursuit.

When I first got into audio I was repeatedly led to believe that the Linn Isobarik was the bees knees.

Imagine my shock and disappointment when I finally got to hear a pair. Where are they now, the 1980s so-called best speakers in the world?

Now had I somehow bought a pair without listening first, unlikely as it would have been on a students income, I might have been tempted to visit some of those ’journalists’ in person to demand an explanation.

@decooney,

'Thinking about this thread some more, a question comes to mind.

With local audio dealers disappearing the past 25 years, and nowhere for folks to go and listen in person in remote places - are some people blindly buying speakers over the internet, crossing their fingers, and hoping it works?'



It's even worse now with the lack of audio shows!

Apparently according to the big boffins over at Audioholics even listening to well recorded demos on YouTube is of little real use - mainly down to its standard low audio bitrate of only128 kbps.

Apparently the vastly better 256kbps is available for premium subscribers. 

So data and measurement now seems to be the way to go when you can't listen in person. Considered opinions and user experiences are important too - especially from those who have similar musical priorities as yourself.

Thankfully there are plenty among us here who have valuable first hand experience of a wide range of audio gear.