Oh, I completely agree. Just taking the discussion from something I know nothing about to something I know dangerously little about. I do DJ work and work with setting up bands and some of this stuff rubs off on me; but not enough to be that informed. What I am confident in, is that any discussion about car or home speakers aka, number and specs of drivers and driver types, is way down on the food chain when it comes to making a worthwhile system. The speaker environment alone accounts for 1/2 at least, the influence on sound we hear. Speaker efficiency though measurable and absolute varys dramatically in practice and is very environment dependent in use. I think you can agree with that. Heck we agree on just about everything else…;=) just trying to stir the pot.
I got where you were comming from. I’ve heard speakers rated for less then 60 watts that would blow your head off.
Btw, my son has a pair of small tower Boston Acoustic home speakers that use 9by 5 drivers from their audio line. They are excellent, been trying to trade for them for years, but he is smarter than I and sees through my scams.
Just to toss in my 2 cents (or less) - often the aftermarket speakers are more efficient than the base factory speakers because they have bigger magnets. And the ‘power rating’ for a speaker is separate from the ‘efficiency’. In my experience the power rating is really useless - it seems to say ‘don’t use an amp with more than X watts output’, when more powerful amps are actually less likely to blow out a speaker, because they are not driven into clipping as easily as a low-power amp. And clipping is often the cause of blown speakers because of the large amount of distortion-related high frequencies.
And I agree, most speaker specs are pretty useless.
dagosa…Since you’re into DJ work…one of my first jobs out of college was working with a company that designed and sold sound systems for theaters (movie and stage). We would set up microphones all over the theater and the data would be fed into a computer (Digital PDP-11). I wrote the program to analyze the data to determine optimum number of speakers and placement. Real cool job…but I only got paid by the job and it wasn’t enough to really earn a living at.
My home speakers I built using Altec components. Horn top-end with a 12" woofer bottom.
I agree with everything else you’ve said…But this I don’t agree with…
Speaker efficiency though measurable and absolute varys dramatically in practice and is very environment dependent in use
Speaker efficiency is measured at 1 meter (usually centered) from the speaker. Room characteristics won’t come into play at that distance. Now I do agree that a speaker may be louder in one room over the next…but that’s speaker efficiency…that’s something totally different.
Mike, speaker efficiency is measured at 1 meter, centered in an anechoic chamber. Home speakers are usually tested in their enclosure with all the drivers present. In the home, with the speaker usually a short distance from a wall, room characteristics probably won’t come into to plat at 1 meter, but they will when you are in the center of the room or in the usual listening place.
Car speakers do not come in an enclosure. When set in a door, reflections will bounce off the exterior door panel and back onto the speaker cone at different phase relationships depending on the frequencies applied. That will color the sound before it even leaves the speaker cone. On top of that, since you are trying to change the direction that the cone is moving, you can generate a counter EMF in the speaker coil that will reflect back to the amplifier. A car is just a lousy place to attempt to make an quality audiophile environment, especially with speakers located in the door.
Of course none of this has anything to do with my original statement about high power speakers having less sound at low power applications. You are right that it is the efficiency that determines sound level. Yes there are high efficiency speakers that are rated for high power, but when you look at a lot of speaker specs, there is a trend of higher power capacity means less efficiency.
Generally higher power speakers use larger size conductors and fewer turns. This makes the speaker less efficient, but also less resonant, so it will have a flatter frequency response. Things that go into increasing the efficiency of a speaker system of a given design are lighter and more rigid cones (more cost), higher purity copper (oxygen free, weld free, more cost) conductors, heat sinks, stronger magnets (more cost) and or multiple drivers (three way, four way, more cost). Most moderately priced speakers with high efficiency and high power capacity will have a poor frequency response.
One of the reasons that I used power handling as a reference is that unless you are ordering from a place like Crutchfield, its hard to find the efficiency spec on a speaker, but its max power capacity is right there in big bold letters.
Mike…I hear you. Sometimes I say speaker when I mean driver. The driver efficiency is pretty much set in stone…the speaker efficiency when assembled with it’s components is another matter. I wasn’t clear i was talking about about efficiency of an entire system when at listening distances.
That’s real interesting stuff. What we did in comparison is pretty low tech. Mixing boards and EQ in the back with a non playing member is the closest we get to matching room acoustics. Small bands operate on a shoe stiring. My outfit at home is mostly hand me owns from son who managed a Tweeter store. Admitt to being a bass freak and I generally abide by the older is better, prefer paper drivers and horns for my mains too. Now when I instruct ballroom dancing, I find it necessary to used powered PA’s hooked to a laptop…so you can see, sound quality takes a back seat to convenience.
. But, I strongly feel that hype and all this attention to specs in home stereos is over done for sales. In reality, professional audio is much more sane in it’s measurements. I have to laugh at home stereo (and.car) when the discussion turns to driver composition and frequeny response when in reality speakers are just noise makers and what you don’t do in their construction is often as important as what you do.
My outfit at home is mostly hand me owns from son who managed a Tweeter store.
I bought my center channel (Klipsch) from them when they went out of business. Nice store…but pricy…
I haven’t done anything in the professional sound area in over 30 years. My home speakers use components found in studio monitors. That’s as close as I get these days. I use to have a nice Crown amp (PL-4)…but when I went to home theater I needed more then just 2 channel amp.
MyOne of the reasons that I used power handling as a reference is that unless you are ordering from a place like Crutchfield, its hard to find the efficiency spec on a speaker, but its max power capacity is right there in big bold letters.
Max power capacity it so often used as a marketing thing these days to make people think the higher the power handling capabilities…the louder (or in many cases the better) the sound is. It is usually the LAST spec I look at. It has little bearing on how loud a speaker will get and it surely has NOTHING to do with sound quality.
There is really nothing like talking with those with experience. If you buy from a chain store, it won’t happen. But if Crutchfield is anything like the component suppliers I have used in the past to build speakers from their components, a talk with their technicians is much more valuable then ordering on your own.
When thinking about changing out the drivers in my wife’s Accord years ago, the technician told me there was nothing available to replace what was factory anywhere, that he could sell that would sound better then what I had. If I wanted to do lots of cutting, sure. But generally, their policy was not to sell you something to make a buck if it did not work. I may be in the minority, but their advice has been much better then pretending I knew what I was doing.
Sometimes I’m bright enough to know, when I’'m not that bright.
Mike…I hear you. Sometimes I say speaker when I mean driver. The driver efficiency is pretty much set in stone…the speaker efficiency when assembled with it’s components is another matter.
I agree with that…A woofer put in a Base-Reflex enclosure will be far more efficient then one in a sealed cabinet…but not as efficient as one in a horn loaded system.
Horn loaded high-frequency is far far more efficient then a standard dome tweeter…
Mike…lSpeaker Q, free air resonance etc. are some of the more important speaker specs we loaded into a computer years ago at the school we worked. Friend took a programming course that allowed us to run a simple set of speaker specs. that would help us determine box dimensions and port length and diameter. With these variables, the computer program would plot a projected low end frequency response curve based upon our inputs. It was amazing accurate and made us realize how simple speaker design relative to low end response was. We designed our own crossovers, some we made external, to allow crude adjustments at gigs or home when we moved boxes from one room to another. The boxes were the tough part, so we later became dump scavengers looking for the right size speaker boxes. Amazing what people throw away. Neighbor owned one of the busiest land fills in the state. Our orders were often filled within a month or two. We stopped the tedious task of building boxes for smaller systems with this source.
We learned quickly that the response of a system depends upon two enclosures, the one behind the driver that it is mounted in, and the one on the other side of the radiating surface which is the room, or car that the system is playing in.
Friend took a programming course that allowed us to run a simple set of speaker specs. that would help us determine box dimensions and port length and diameter.
I’ve used one of them to build my current speakers. It uses the thiele small parameters as the model for it’s program. Mine are base-reflex with a 3" port.
The first Acoustic suspension speaker (AR-1) used a very efficient speaker driver from Altec Lansing. You really need very efficient speaker driver for an acoustic suspension enclosure.
Much to the chagrin of my wife, My first foray into hi if was my bro. in law who went active and left me his Sansui8 receiver and AR2ax speakers. Great sounding but whoefully inefficient for the power available in the 55 watt Sansui which was a lot back then. Theoretically, any driver can produce full range accurate sound, given the right electronics and EQ. Bose does it with reasonable success along with JBL pro lines. They just won’t last very long with the excursion or heat dissipation if they are too small or have poor dispersion if two big. So really, other than their use in adapting the environment of both the box and room to the speaker driver when constructing or mounting in a car which is the engineers prerogative, most speaker specs are pure hype.
Altec Lansing makes /made( every thing now is made in china it seems) really good drivers. Still partial to cellulose based untreated paper drivers with large magnets, whose resonance frequencies are easier to be had in a range that doesn’t make you throw up when you have to work in front of them for hours on end. So I end up preferring them at home.
Unfortunately, car environment is tough on them. One reason car audio is a huge compromise…
Altec Lansing makes /made( every thing now is made in china it seems) really good drivers.
Actually the Altec Lansing that’s around today is NOT the same company. Back in the 80’s the parent company (LTV) of Altec split off Altec so Altec was on it’s own…UNFORTUNATELY LTV left Altec with a huge dept. LTV basically bought companies and just bleed them dry. Altec Lansing being strapped for cash sold it’s name “Altec Lansing Consumer Products” to a Canadian company called “Sparkomatic”. If you’re old enough you may remember them. The Real Altec continued selling Pro ONLY and was eventually bought out by a company that became Telex corp. One other company Telex owned was Electro-Voice. The president of EV talked Telex corp into combining the companies and eventually shut Altec down. The real Altec that produced two of the most famous speakers EVER (604 and VOT) and for over 60 years was the world leader in Professional audio no longer exists. At one point Altec was in 80% of all movie houses around the world…and their recording studio speakers were in more recording studios then the next top 5 competitors COMBINED.
HOWEVER…the last plant that designed and built the “Real” Altec Lansing speakers was bought out by one of the last engineers (Bill Hanuschak). He started a company (Great Plains Audio in Oklahoma City) so the THOUSANDS of Altec installations around the world could get their gear serviced. He was building parts to the exact standards and designs using the same machine tools that the original Altec used when it was around. The company “Great Plains Audio” is also building old some of the older Altec equipment (604 speakers and many of Altec’s famous drivers). And doing quite well from what I understand.
When Telex finally shut down the Real Altec…Sparkomatic bought the name Altec Professional…but never really did anything with it. They offered a few speakers made in China to sell, but it never panned out. They never set up dealerships or service centers.
Yes, I remember the name Sparkomatic. I have trouble visualizing them supporting Altec previous efforts with a name like that. Maybe they did too. :=) like Audiovox buying the name AR, there goes the neighborhood.
Sparkomatic wanted to get into the high-end speaker game…If they used their own name they would have been laughed out of business…So they bought the name “Altec Lansing Consumer Products”. They were in no way related to the Real Altec/Lansing…Just in Name “only”.
Sparkomatic later changed it’s name to Altec Lansing Technologies and moved it’s headquaters to Milford PA. The quote High-End Speakers end quote were NOT that high-end. The real Altec built some beautiful home speakers through the 70’s and into the 80’s…then just concentrated on Pro audio…that’s when they sold it’s name. Two completely separate companies with almost the same name…“Altec Lansing Pro” and Altec Lansing Technologies".
Altec Lansing Technologies eventually got out of the home audio and concentrated on the PC market.