"Doki" wrote in message
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"David Looser" wrote in message
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"Doki" wrote in message
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"Woody" wrote in message
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"Gordon MacPherson" wrote in message
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I listen mainly to classical music. I have had for many years a pair of
Celestion Ditton 44s driven by an equally old Cambridge P50 amp. I
thought about replacing the Dittons with shelf speakers but none that I
could afford gave me the open "easy" clear cound that came from the
Dittons. I am now in a position to think about floor speakers with a
budget of up to around £1000. Any recommendations as to speakers I
shoud investigate?

Thanks,

Gordon



Whatever you do remember one thing. To get the good easy sound that you
like you need to move air, and to move air properly you need a big
drive unit. Ruark and Royd do nice speakers but mainly with small drive
units, so they have to move a long way to shift much air. If you look
at the likes of Linn, B&W, Monitor Audio, and Mission floor-standers
you will find most of them have larger drive units.


That's something that I don't understand. Hifi is supposedly all about
getting decent sound reproduction. However, most hifi speakers have bass
drivers so small they've got no chance of producing any sort of decent
bass. .
That's an overly simplistic analysis. To get you bass you need to move a
lot of air, but that need not necessarily mean a large driver. A
long-throw driver can move as much air as a larger short-throw driver,
whilst the cabinet design also comes into play here. The most extreme
example is the exponential horn, where it's the size of the horn mouth
that matters, not the driver. Horn-loaded cinema speakers from the 1920s
and 1930s often had bass drivers as small as 2".

Throw can help, but at the end of the day, the size of the cone matters a
lot. As an example, a 6" sub driver I looked at for my car has a piston
area of 114cm2, the next size up, which is 7.125" has a piston area of
231cm2. Given similar throws (the larger speaker actually has a longer
throw), you're going to get twice as much air moved by a driver only a
little bit bigger. The dimensions are to the outer edge of the suspension
by the way. For a normal hifi speaker (ie, a box with some drivers stuck
in the front), there's no substitute for a big cone.
A car is hardly a good example of anything to do with HiFi. As for speakers
that are "a box with some drivers stuck in the front", maybe it's better to
engineer a good enclosure than to think that size is all that matters.

Also don't forget the huge effect of the room on the bass performance of a
speaker, it's impossible to get really deep bass in the average living room.

David.