What are the specs of a full range speaker?

Md you lost me. back to the idea of full range, options/tradeoffs.

Mdhoover has a valid point. Your speaker is no good if it can do 20hZ whilst sounding terrible. There are lots of speakers that measure flat from where to where, all the while sounding dull, and lifeless.

Bartokfan, you touched on the same subject in your conversations with your speaker designer. In his designs, you give up some midrange fidelity by going to a bigger driver.

It takes a big speaker to bring all the decibels in full orchestra into play, not to mention the grand sweep of a symphony in full cry.

Muralman, well by going with a 3 way, the single 8inch will bring in the lower hz's that I;m missing with the dual 7's MTMdesign. Fidelity is not the issue, as its the same Seas' drivers. Its that a single 7 acting as the midwoofer in the 3 way (8/7/tweet) will not bring out a full a voice as the MTM/dual 7's. But with the 8 I;'ll get to hear some of the lower octaves that I am missing in my MTM. The bass cellos, cellos, timpini, tubas all have some notes in the 30-40 range that I'd like to hear. It'll be an interresting trade off. I may not like it, and the Tyler 3 ways is a nice chunck of money at $3500. What I;m gaining to hear those rare but precious lower octaves in the 3 ways, may not be worth the sacrifice of losing the fullness of the dual 7's/lower hz's. IOW the 3 way may sound anemic, the lower mid hz's may be a weakened image.
Can I live with that?

Bartokfan

"back to the idea of full range, options/tradeoffs."

Your speakers (if they are the ones at the Madisound site have a spec of -3db@45hz, all things being equal...if we compare them to speakers that measure -3db@90hz...which one has more trade off?

If another person has speakers that measure -3db@20hz and we compare them against yours...we have a nearly equal trade off...an octave.

Of course this is assuming we are playing software with fullrange info on it....you can't miss whats not there.

If you listen to a lot of large scale classical music...you are missing a lot and the results would be as clear as a cloudless day with a truly fullrange pair of speakers placed next to yours...assuming again, that you liked the overall sound of the new speakers....Not Apogees of course!

Dave

It's useful to think in terms of how our auditory system might have developed. Sensing low frequency vibrations is useful to survival. Sources that make such low frequencies are likely to be harmful. Very high frequencies beyond those used for localization, OTH, are unlikely to be important.

Then consider the mass of the auditory apparatus, an eardrum, three articulated bones with a muscle attached, one of which rocks on a fluid filled structure that houses hair cells along a membrane. Perturbation of these hair cells causes firing of nerve cells, and the firing of those nerve cells leads through higher processing to the perception of sound. Hardly the design for an ultra HF transducer.

Now the argument can be made that beating among higher harmonics can generate combinations tones that are in the audible range, but the harmonics themselves are of much lower levels than the primaries from which they are generated, and any combination tones are at an even lower level.

Disclosure: My doctoral and post doc work was in binaural processing, but most of my pre-retirement career was as a director of a research program then a research center, so I have been out of the technical loop for decades.

I go along with the long-standing notion of 20 to 20 KHz or even 30 to 15 KHz being full range for a speaker system, but I've come to prefer that LF below 80 Hz be handled by a servo-controlled sub. Soundstaging and transparancy are more important to me than absolute frequency range, but I do enjoy that vibration one feels when a big pipe is invoked, whether at an organ recital or in my home.

db