So how do you choose or buy a new loudspeaker? Well at the moment you have little choice but to use your ears. But given that the showroom setup and the salespeople are setup in a manner that does not allow you to compare equally we are kind of screwed. Ah you might say, they have this thing that switches between speakers so I can rapidly listen to each one (it’s called a comparator btw) but this is a very poor system. Each speaker has to be in a different location so you get a different set of reflections different listening angle, different toe-in, even the speakers different impedance and sensitivity will mean you will hear different levels which may or may not be adjusted for by the sales person, oh and even worse, you have often got little or no idea how the anp/receiver has been set up, how much processing has been imposed, Eq set, and so it goes on. At least get the sales person to set the Reciever to DIRECT or equivalent and if possible turn any Eq or other settings off.
So back to my original question. What to do? First of all you need (I need, we all need) to start writing to the manufacturers and asking for real specifications. They do it for car tyres, it’s stamped on the side! What specifications do we want? Well not just on-axis frequency response but off-axis response and Directivity Index. The place to read about this is in “Sound Reproduction” by Floyd Toole starting around Chapter 17. The fact is that almost everyone when comparing speakers prefer speakers that show certain characteristics, this is now well proven. Then when tested these speakers show similar results. But here’s the catch. It seems to have little to do with price or brand. In fact some of the VERY expensive BIG name brand speakers that people have raved about (including “professional” reviewers) are in fact atrocious. Cheap speakers have sometime yielded surprises.
At HTE we are considering based on advice and study, the possibility of testing every speaker we can get our hands on and publishing the results, the main problem is that we don’t have an anechoic chamber, but this may not be such a big problem after all. Having read Floyds book, we believe we “may” be able to test well enough to identify a good speaker from a bad. We will keep you posted on this.
Back to the same old question, how do I buy a good speaker? Well it would seem a pattern is emerging from what I can see and so I am looking at speakers with a decent sized woofer combined with compression drivers and horns for mids and highs.
But the sad fact is that there is just no criteria available that you can look at and say “hey that’s a damn fine speaker”. Yet if the manufacturers just did the tests, and published them we could do just that. Now why on earth would speaker manufacturers not want to do this I wonder? As the phrase goes “the truth is out there”.
So write to manufacturers and ask for data showing On-axis and off-axis responses with Directivity Index (tell them to get the details from Floyd Toole’s book) and then we can really sort the noise from the truth. Too many people have paid a LOT of money for speakers that are truly no good, and some people have done very well with some cheaper speakers that are awesome. Until such time as the specs are truly published (and 25Hz to 20KHz +/- 3db is just a useless spec by the way) stick with buying what sounds good to you at the time because that’s all you can do right now. Yes the speakers next to the ones you chose that were $700 cheaper may actually produce better sound but you will never know that in the shop environment, there are just far to many variables. Lots of luck. Oh, and if you want to help out one day and send speakers to us to test, keep and eye on this blog and we will let you know when.
So start writing to those manufacturers and asking for, nay demanding specifications.