speakers for classical music

I'm only wondering how much of a real world factor it is with high quality, high fidelity speakers.

On compressed pop/rock and especially the more modern stuff on CD; Green Day/Red Hot Chilli's/Metallica/Artic Monkeys/Kooks/most remasters and thousands of others - not an issue at all - as the music is already compressed crap anyway!!!

On old school dynamic recordings - classical, Mahler, Shostakovich or great jazz recordings of big band and Sheffield Labs/Chesky/XRCD type stuff it is a HUGE issue. The life of the music is robbed by compression. After a few seconds at the start of the track you are already hearing compression.

Remember at 87 db if you have a large room then your speakers may be at an average of 95 db - already the "average" music at that level is starting to be compressed - so naturally the peaks or what immediately follows them will be even more compressed and worse even "modulated" by the rapid cooling and heating of the voice coil from percussion elements. This is why piano rarely sounds realistic and often sounds like a recording.

Analogy: Think of the voice coil as being like the thin resitive wire in a light bulb...how fast does that get hot - what do you think the heat and momentarily increased resistance does to the transient behaviour and timbre of sounds - well it modifes it significantly!!

It is easy to hear - the first few seconds of a loud passage will sound crisp detailed and clear and then it will rapidly start to sound dull. For example Michael Jackson Bille Jean - the opening will be clear and punchy and crystal clear (like a shotgun) and then it will soon become dull and loose its edge on most speakers.

Shadorne, I'm not hearing that. I DO sit near-field due to my room shape and the furniture layout, so maybe I'm not compressing my drivers much even with an 87dB avg at the listening position.

This weekend I'll torture myself for a while to see if I can simulate it in my system.

Dave

I DO sit near-field due to my room shape and the furniture layout

Absolutely not a problem then. This is why consumer speakers tend to go with the lower cost drivers (pro drivers with large voice coils sound no better at low volumes than consumer type drivers, IMHO).

As you move to a near field position compression is much less of a problem because every time you half the distance to teh speaker you gain 6 db - so you get back all that headroom that you only lose if the speaker is driven too hard.

You probably need to be at least 8 feet or more back and to be listening loud (at realistic levels) to start to run into this issue in a significant way on most floorstanders. I believe this is often the situation in setups with floorstanders.

I believe this is one of the principle reasons you find things sound "messy" with some demos you have heard of other speakers with full orchestra classical and big band.( Xmax limitations might be the other issue especially on designs with long coils in short gap where the linear operating region is often not as good as specifications might suggest - some drivers publish VC physical gap geometry calculated Xmax as oppposed to the more stringent 10% linear tolerance)

Another example, on the subject of compression, in this case "ringing" may rob the midrange of dynamic range Stereophile Review. Ringing also reduces the contrast or sharpness in transients which is why Quad 57's are cherished (with its nice waterfall) for being "fast" and beautifully detailed even if they are limited dynamically.

Acoustat6, I'm unwilling to dive for the volume control once I have established the right volume level otherwise. With most systems, Das Reingold forces you to otherwise keep the volume at a level that is unrealistically low.

Shadorne's comments about compression are right on. FWIW, Classic Audio Reproductions has been using and are developing field coil drivers (at the recent AudioKarma show they demo'd the speaker with FC woofers and midrange).

Otherwise, one of the advantages of Alnico is that fact that the magnetic structure can be focused on the gap; saturation is easy enough and one of the measures of the designer's mettle is 'is it still saturated at 105 or 110db?' With heating and the like, that's a bit of a trick!

BTW in an average room where you are 8-10 feet from the speaker, a speaker with 89 db 1watt/1meter efficiency could need 250 to 500 watts to make 110db (how dead the room is will play a role too so this power requirement could be a lot higher, OTOH a lively room may well prevent one from being able to hit lifelike peaks without discomfort). You really don't want the amp to be clipping at it highest volume, so its easy to see how hard it is to work with inefficient speakers. If you happen to prefer tubes, 200 watts is a practical upper limit before the term 'gold-plated decibels' really starts to hit home!

Once you have heard how important this is, it gets hard to take inefficiency seriously.