Is the most efficient speaker the best speaker?

Timlub, thank you, but, I'm familiar with Atmasphere's article.

Power being the product of voltage and current, I must have one SLIGHT beef in terms.

Voltage Source....no problem (paradigm, if you insist)
Current Source....Instead of 'power'. (again, paradigm if you insist)

See the writings of Pass for further information...
Read this with the Atmo article::

http://www.passdiy.com/pdf/cs-amps-speakers.pdf

Hi Magfan, I am no amp designer, I have built alot of speakers. Recently I built a nice MTM. I ended up with an 4 ohm bottom and an 8 ohm top..... In speakers anyway, where you deal with impedance dips and peaks of up to 30 ohm or more, it is not unusual for a speaker even in a network of speakers to get hotter than the others when an amplifier (in power paradigms ss peaks power to certain loads. That is one of the few reasons that impedance compensation is used and often resonance compensation. In this current MTM, I drop to 3.8 ohms in the bass through the midrange while the tweeter has a peak up around 12 or 14 ohms. I had to place the crossover so that the crossover point was low enough to stay away from where the power hump would be in the response & impedance curves, otherwise you would have clearly dealt with fatigue above the crossover point because of the power paradigm. I am not experienced enough in amp to design to properly discuss power or voltage paradigms in amps. I hope this is adequate explanation(90 % accurate for explanation)to make since of a power paradigm in speakers.

Magfan, I have one slight beef also. If one were to take away the bias, one could often reverse the positions, and perhaps to better effect.

Unsound, is this the comment you want me to prove?:

Now the Power Paradigm offers that possibility of being that much closer to the music. The idea is that the technology is totally committed to the rules of human hearing, which I think all of us can agree is the foundation of audio; without our ears we would not play with audio gear at all.

OTOH the Voltage Paradigm is all about looking good on paper (IOW pays little attention to human hearing rules), which our ears could give a damn about.

So going to higher efficiency is clearly an access to transformation in sound quality. Of course its better!

The first paragraph seems to require little in the way of proof; I can guarantee that if we did not have ears we would not play with audio equipment. That part is simple enough.

Paragraph two is simply taking on the idea that the main issue of the Voltage Paradigm is that it produces good numbers without those numbers having much to do with hearing rules. The proof is one that I know you already have seem me expound on in the past: The Voltage Paradigm looks for constant voltage response out of the amp. Another part of its platform is distortion as low as possible. In 99 44/100ths of cases, this requires loop negative feedback in the amp.

Designers have known since the 1950s (see Norman Crowhurst- I'm not going to dig this up for you since it appears you need the history) that loop negative feedback increases odd ordered harmonic content. That violates the most important hearing rule- the one of how we detect sound pressure, which is done by listening and measuring the the amount of odd ordered harmonics. Obviously if these harmonics have been enhanced (distorted) even slightly, we can hear it and it will the difference between what we call 'good sound' and what we call music. The paragraph closes with the simple fact that our ears don't listen to numbers on paper. Your eyes are better suited to that task.

The closing paragraph simply points out that the higher efficiency drivers are better suited to Power Paradigm technology, which from the previous paragraphs we saw pays closer attention to the effects of distortion upon the ear. That is why I used the word 'access' and 'transformation' as when this approach is used the results are instantly audible to anyone- it takes no golden ear to hear.

Did we have the conversation about what Chaos Theory has to say about amplifiers with negative feedback?