What are the specs of a full range speaker?


I've noticed that this term is used pretty loosely around here and I'm wondering what you think of when you read it in an ad. What does "full range speaker" really mean? Is it 20Hz to 20 Khz? I've always considered it to mean a speaker that reaches down into the 30s with some weight. What's your interpretation?
macrojack
Muralman1, I agree, and then some.

The real thing is the only thing! No audio system will ever come close, not by a great margin, to ever reproducing the dynamics and power of a grand piano. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been listening to much live piano music, in the home or concert halls. And it ain't just the sub 30's either. JMHO of course. :-)
Newbee, Don't be so sure. I have both. It was an Apogee Scintilla in a large stiff listening room that fooled me into believing I was listening to a pianist playing a grand. It did appear to be somewhere in the distance, as down the hall. I was awestruck. My present system takes my Scintillas to far beyond what was possible when they were made. It may be lunacy, but my goal is to duplicate the piano.

I wouldn't be the first. An Apogee enthusiast conductor use to give Mozart lectures at the Smithsonian's display containing the composer's piano. For fun, he would run a blind test on the audience. Alternating between the real deal and an Apogee Diva system. He asked the audience which they thought was real.

The Scintilla is even more convincing with the piano.
Muralman1, I can't dispute what you've heard. Certainly I've not duplicated your experience. FWIW, and not a real comparison, but I'm sure you've heard a stereo system playing 'upstairs'. For those of us who have lived in flats or apartments/condo's etc, that would be common. Well when I lived in a flat in SF the upstairs unit had a grand piano - it never, ever, sounded like a stereo system. Especially transmitted thru the floor above. You knew what it was instantly - there is a whole lot of 'vibrations' going on with a live piano at all frequencies that just seem to elude (most?) audio systems abilities to reproduce with the same degree of dynamics as a live piano.
BTW I assume you meant by 'in the distance' that the sound seemed a bit compressed as compared to 'live' and that certainly would be one of my points of comparison. :-)
My best friend just finished a feature film, and he was present when the Seattle Symphony recorded the score. In the church where they recorded, the composer and sound engineers set up a playback system identical to the one in the studio (which I heard on a recent trip to LA), so they could hear the recording immediately after each piece was played. Back and forth they went, live symphony to recorded symphony, for nearly a week. Very quickly, he said, the difference between live and recorded was so dramatic that the two sounded completely unrelated to one another, irrespective of whether they listened to the playback via the speakers or headphones. Didn't matter. Go to a studio and listen to the musicians play, and then listen to the recording. They are completely different events, always. Even the person at the helm has a huge effect on the resulting sound, so much so that we can recognize a recording produced by Daniel Lanois, or Butch Vig, for example. We might convince ourselves that a recording sounds 'so realistic', but it isn't. Never will be. A piano strike does not sound the same once passed through microphone, cord, processors, compression, gating, mixing, mastering, and the various components and cables that are assembled by nothing more than a personal preference. And we haven't even begun to consider the effects of comparing the recording space to the room where our system resides! Live and recorded, they are not even close to being the same, no matter how many times we attempt to convince ourselves that they are.