The two most common mistakes are bass and treble

Its always important to be careful about conflating personal anecdote with how things are: just because you have one efficient speaker that is bested by others of lessor efficiency does not mean that what I’m saying is incorrect.

@atmasphere I don't believe I was indicating your statements are incorrect. I actually said you made good points regarding distortion and speaker efficiency. My anecdote was strictly to illustrate my subjective preferences. In learning from one of the best engineers in the business who touted that greater benefits could be achieved from his amps if they were light loaded due to lowering distortion, making the amp work more efficiently, and extending tube life, that obviously aligns with your comments. From an engineering and design perspective, this is just the way it works, there is nothing otherworldly about it. That same engineer designed OTL amps. His preference would have been using them with 16 or even 32 ohm loads and he often lamented the lack of speakers being manufactured with those specs. As I told him and as I'll state now, unfortunately the audio world we live in isn't going to change course. We're not going to see a huge spike in the manufacturing of high impedance, high efficiency speakers anytime soon just because it's the better method.

@clio09 I wasn't really saying you were wrong, nor did I feel that you were saying that I was either, but I felt from your comments that I should flesh some things out a bit more. I agree with everything Roger states from your comment above. Despite conversations like this nothing is going to change; although people reading this might be a tad more careful.


Older solid state amps tend to run too little feedback which is why they can sound bright and harsh. Driving higher impedances helps with this simply by reducing distortion, which is the source of the brightness.

I think Roger didn't like that we run no feedback in our OTLs but the reason was I knew that if we used feedback, the phase margins of the amps would never permit enough to be applied. That's actually true of every tube amp. So to prevent the dreaded brightness coloration we ran no feedback at all and relied on other means to keep distortion at bay.

IMO to many people do not have a clear understanding of what bass actually is. Bass should be what the artist and producer have made it as part of the whole sound. Most artist have what I would call tight bass guitar that harmonizes with the drummer. This is where you need to separate bass into the multiple categories that it is. A kick drum I want to feel like a punch to the gut, a bass guitar I want to provide a solid tight rhythm to the track. What really confused most listeners was when Tool and others introduced drop D tuning. This lead listeners to think all songs should play down there, but they don’t. To many time people want to over produce “all” bass and you end up with mud or a lot of uncompressed vibrations. This is very common in hip hop as it masked over the crap sound of everything else that is all just over sampled tracks they borrow. Then you also run into the track production. If the artist and produce did not put the bass in you can’t make it appear out of thin air and expect it to sound good. Yes different speakers make bass in different ways but in the end you want to hear what the artist gave us. Everyone wants to be or thinks they are “producers” and can or could have done better. I think speakers and their numbers should best the main type of music you listen to. If a Marshall bottom is running 8 ohm and 90 db on most music I like I want my speaker to try and reproduce the sound the artist has made.

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I like speaker than can follow gentle harmonic structure and textures on Indian Girl by the slick Rick.