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Your advice to speakers designers

What would it be?
I'd say - instead of building great furniture that also happens to sound good give us great sounding speakers that also happen to be acceptable furniture.
inna
erik_squires
15,631 posts
 
A crossover with variable levels for the drivers will save a ton of money and cash on cables. :)

E
douglas_schroeder
3,281 posts
 

As a reviewer my advice to manufacturers; ignore 99% of this thread and carry on.

Many of the suggestions show a cheapness, a belief that cheaper is as good or better. This is a beautiful way to dumb down the audiophile experience. At the same time they would have manufacturers build butt ugly speakers. Wow, that's a real sales bonus. :(

This site is infested with cheapskates. It shows in so many threads, where the goal is the cheapest component. You'll never attain anything close to SOTA with that attitude. Thank God there are manufacturers who don't work towards the lowest common denominator. We have people who would have a coronary if they were to contemplate spending $5K on any speaker trying to give advice on what speaker manufacturers should do. Uh, NO. Not the way to progress in the industry.

Then we have the contingent of people obsessed about appearances. A large number of them are also cheapskates. They completely discount craftsmanship in the industry, as though everyone deserves a butt ugly speaker in their home.

Others of you seem ignorant of the fact that likely over 90% of audiophiles do not care about attaining more complex speaker systems. A very small segment of the population wants more complexity in speakers/systems. Frankly, the entire field of studio-like more complex speaker systems imo has not proven to be inherently superior to a great passive setup. Yeah, I have done the comparisons, several times.

The fact is that if a speaker manufacturer listened to the input here he/she could tank their business pretty quickly. :(

teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
Loudspeaker design is done in the physical world, so it’s a set of balanced out trade offs, like most other endeavors.

No single magic bullet of knowledge, just a set of skills and lore and raw talent ---applied to a problem that is in front of the given person.

Billions of set of individually crafted hearing mechanisms and ear/brains, with vague commonality between them, thus the thousands of speakers which are considered ’excellent’ or ’bad’. No mystery with the more correct question in hand to see it for what it is.

The idea of a single best speaker is just the ’body politic’ trying to assert itself and socialize behaviour patterns so the clan can keep itself safe, over the long term -- from the lions in the tall grass.

Ie, the big loudspeaker on the cover the glossy magazine is the end point in generalization of social/cultural function, the masses standardizing themselves into a set pattern for the benefit of the whole or the benefit of the given ’leadership’ of the clan. The evidential trail or markers/indicators of human physiology and psychology.

Individualism is exactly that: individualism. And everyone’s got themselves some of that. We are lucky if we can find a way to maximize audio qualities for one customer, or even ourselves, never mind all or any given group consensus.
prof
3,435 posts
 
Ha, the first thing that came to my mind was almost the opposite of the
OP’s view. My first impulse is to say build better looking speakers!!!!!

Aesthetics are important to me, speakers are a form of furniture - I will be placing them in a room whose aesthetics I care about and I’ll be staring at the speakers for long periods of time listening.

I know quite a number of audiophiles don’t care so much about aesthetics and frankly, their listening rooms show it; like I’m looking at a frat-guy’s place with every bit of equipment and wire spilled all over in view and little care for the looks of the room. (Though there are also some absolutely beautiful set ups in the virtual systems pictures as well).

Overall I think the aesthetics of speaker design has upped it’s game over the years. That said, some of the design aesthetics are still what an engineer with no design experience would think of as "cool."

This being an audiophile site it goes without saying that we want great sound. So obviously I’m not inclined to say "give me worse sound." But few things to me are more wonderful than a gorgeous lookingspeaker that sounds beautiful.



atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,567 posts
 
My 2 cents:

Keep the impedance and phase angles reasonable. The last thing you want to do is make **any** amplifier work hard, as to do so makes more distortion and it will most likely be audible as harshness and loss of detail.

As an example, many speaker designers put dual woofers in parallel, creating a 4 ohm load in the bass. The problem is that most of the energy in music is in the woofers, so most of the distortion the amp is going to make is going to be the result of how hard it has to work to drive the woofers.

A simple way to make any speaker with any amp sound more transparent and smoother is to simply raise the impedance. You can see the implications of this in the specs of any amplifier, tube, solid state or class D.

A second beef is that many speaker companies equate sensitivity and efficiency as the same thing when they are a bit different. It would be better if both specs were stated.
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