Bloated speakers/weight wise


Hopefully most of us are keeping to our new years diet resolutions. But what about speakers, can they be overweight too? How many of us enjoy shoving around a speraker that weighs in at MORE than we do? I mean really is it really necessary to have speakers that weigh in at more than 150 lbs? I might go as high as 175, but even that is in need of a diet. What do you get more from a 150 lb speaker that i don't get from my 70 lb speaker.
So who are the haaviest speakers on the planet? list some brands and corresponding weiths.
I know Legacy and Wilson's are up there, any others?
bartokfan
Easy now Paul. That 2286 lbs/pair is shipping weight. I'm sure they are absolutely svelte when you take the X-2's out of their crates. :-)

John
I finally found a weight on the Magico's, sort of. The website says, "they weigh nearly half a ton".
[QUOTE]..."The problem involves lowering the sonic contribution of the speaker cabinet, which at some frequencies can amount to 40% of the overall sound emitted by the speaker"...[END QUOTE]

Try this some time...Next time your listening to music, press one ear tightly to the cabinet and plug the other ear. When I did this, what I heard was not good. If I could magically turn of the cabinet, I wonder how much better it would sound, you know, like an A, B comparison.
Macrojack: What you're essentially saying is that if you turn down the volume, the cabinet will move less. D'oh! :-)

Seriously though, if you want to achieve the same lower-frequency SPL in-room, you have to move the same amount of air. Can be done through either larger driver area or greater driver excursion. Both have engineering challenges if you want to reduce distortions of the driver (and therefore of the reproduced signal) in several forms. So some designs involve using many LF drivers, which can reduce both area and excursion on a per-driver basis, at the expense of increased cost for the multiple drive units and larger cabinets to house them all (which, to the topic at hand, obviously makes for heavier speakers). But the other trend in the industry has been toward EQ'ed subwoofers with small, inconspicuous cabinets, and these drivers have some amazing levels of peak excursion, at the expense of accepting increased distortion in an area where the ear is less sensitive to it, and targeted primarily toward end users who care more about movie soundtrack FX than music quality. Some of these little monsters can move around the floor under high SPLs if not spiked.