Speakers: What's MOST important to you?...

Boy, if you take all these answers and put them all together you would have one hell of a speaker. However, in the real world there is always a trade-off.

Planers (Maggie's & Logans) tend to have great transparency in the mids, but are damn hard to set up in a real world room and don't have an extended bottom end or great dynamics.

Horns have that engaging lifelike energy, but there's a huge difference between good and bad horns, and they need excellent tubes to sound natural. They also don't image terribly well and tend to be somewhat forward in presentation.

Cones come in all different sizes and shapes and styles. None do it all, so you have to pick your poison. And please remember it's not all in the speaker. The rest of the system matters a lot if you're going to get the most out of what a speaker can do.

For me, I need full frequency response (but a tight sub is acceptable), with realistic and magic mids, and extended and airy and smooth top end without ringing. I need to hear the soundstage and imaging with more music behind the speakers than in my face. They also have to disappear and present that "in the room with you" feeling, and that's as much the room as the speaker.

Enjoy,
Bob

Low distortion at any playback level. And of course it must be full range and musical.

Ptmconsulting, from what I've heard so far I agree with your analysis of the generic sound of different speaker technologies. For me, cones 'n domes win out every time as providing the best balance of sonic tradeoffs, room integration and driveability. The big Coincidents I now have come the closest I've yet heard to my "perfect speaker".

I tend to agree with the posters above who stated that musicality, or drawing them into the music, or forgetting that there are any speakers playing. Those are the most important things, IMO. Those are what listeners are wanting.

The other attributes could be considered "parts" of the whole, and are mainly aspects that the designer and manufacturer should be concerned with. Of course they are important, but mainly to the designers.

I think the reasons that many people pick out parts of the presentation and look for those attributes is that no speakers are perfect, and since compromises are certainly going to be made, they don't want to make them in those key areas of concern.

Ultimately, in my opinion, a speaker(or system in general) must present a somewhat believable and engaging quality that conveys the emotional content of the music in ways that the composers and players intended to convey via the musical performance.

Since the emotional content of music is largely conveyed by dynamic contrasts, and believability is conveyed largely by coherent presentation, with correct tone, and fine detail, I think that a speaker with speed, excellent micro and macro dynamic ability, and a phase-coherent character with good tone is most important to me. Of course, a reasonable amount of frequency range must be covered. Other aspects may be very important, but would rank below these things that I mention first. In other words, I wouldn't sacrifice any of these aspects in order to gain deeper bass extension, or higher max SPL, or whatever. By no means do I intend to say that any part of a speaker's job is not important.

Another thing that must be considered is that speakers do not operate alone, and need to be matched to amplifiers and rooms that can work best with them to exploit the best characteristics.

And of course, they can do nothing that is not originated at the front end of the system. Whatever musical information doesn't get into the system, can never make it out of the speakers. So a quality front end is critical to get the best from your speakers.

The final frontier seems to be resonance control in the system. Speakers, as the actual sound generating transducers in the system, cannot be isolated from themselves. They must be held perfectly rigid to eliminate doppler effects, especially on the tweeter. This eliminates any rubbery substance as a possibility. Any improvement in resonance control in speakers must consist of removing unwanted vibrations from the speaker system. The best way of doing this is via a sophisticated high-speed resonance evacuation route that is designed with resonance transfer as a goal. Not just a hodge-podge thing that LOOKS like one of those engineered systems. Reducing Coulomb's Friction in the resonance transfer path is the way to speed up this evacuation of unwanted resonance and remove it from the speaker so that sound improves without damping out part of the live dynamics, and keeping additional doppler effects out of the equation.

Dawgbyte, how you audition the speakers is very important. You need to remember that what you hear at the store may sound very different when you bring them home. Room acoustics, equipment matching and your mood also vary. If the salesman doesn't know what he's doing and mismatched a great speaker with a badly matched preamp/amp combo then it is your lost to find out the true sound of that speaker. It is always easier to find a pair of speakers that will sound nice in most of the system matchup but it doesn't mean that it is the best speakers out there. It is a more complicated process than you think. Giving all the speakers I audition are all above average, I think size ( to match your listening room ) is more important to me and then the efficiency ( to match your amp.)