Speaker grills

Off: When listening on the weekends! Or impressing fiends during the weak....

As a rule of thumb, most speakers sound better with the grills off. I have the optional grills for my Magico S5's & found this to be the case. However bare in mind some speakers have been designed such that the speaker grills are an integral part of the design. Two such examples would be the classic Infinity Renaissance series speakers & most of the current Avalon models. Ultimately you'd have to a-b test the speakers with and without the grills to know for sure.

Of course it should be mentioned that most grills are *extremely* transparent to the sound, so what doesn't make sense is that having no grills would subjectively make so much difference in the sound. But nobody ever experiments to see why a transparent grill is so bad for the sound. You could even make an experiment using a grill that has only say 1/5 of the number of strands of fibers so the grill is mostly open. Then it would be really, really difficult to explain, no? Same goes for headphone grills, they are bad news.

It is also not just the grill itself but also the grill frame that can interfere with the sound.

I build and tune my systems to sound right with grills on. Grills stay on for both aesthetic and protective reasons.

Various grill designs will inevitably attenuate various frequencies, especially the higher ones to some degree, but between initial speaker design and various things that one can tweak themselves easily if needed, having grill on has never been a practical problem for me.

I once refurbished the hood grills on an old pair of OHM Walshes in that the originals had become worn. These speakers had a particularly laid back presentation. I had to choose a fabric to use and I ended up using a loosely woven wool fabric (much different than thin but much more densely woven material originally used) from the fabric store in order to keep grill effects to a minimum. That also made it easy to stretch and form the fabric tightly and cleanly over the grill hood without having to cut and sew much.