Driver quality is why I like Dynaudio standmounts - magnesium silicate woofers paired with metal coated soft dome tweeters... mated to quality cross-over parts and solid curved cabinets and all tuned to the Flechter-Munson frequency curve... they set the standard in standmount speakers imo.
I like Dynaudio too, I have a 5.1 system with Dynaudio and a REL sub. The tweeter dome indeed is coated, but not with metal! No idea where that comes from... 😲
Thanks Paul and your subscribers for such an awesome channel. Well, back to some rare Wilson Pickett mono and early stereo Lp's. My Shure V15 III cartridge and my recently serviced AR XA turntable helps me out daily. Installed The Q Up for it a few weeks ago. No more bolting too the turntable to lift the tonearm at the end of the record. Heavenly.
As a 'trouble-shooter' assessing a gray-area type question, I often go to the extremes for guidance. In this case, one cabinet is made of concrete, the other a cabinet made of cardboard, or just drivers hanging in the air. I don't know the answer, but I think it helps with the puzzle. Hi Paul.
I think this could be the best DIY approach. I'd like to do reinforced concrete open baffle speakers for 80Hz up and use a pair of really good subs for the low end. If you like OB, they are the easiest thing to get right. Increased mass of the baffle is a good thing. You could even get fancy and have a curved front face.
@@user-od9iz9cv1w I was thinking the same thing. Applying the same finishing technics that are used in concrete counter tops you would have limitless design abilities.
Concrete (reinforced or not) is not a very sound-dead material at all. Concrete slabs easily resonate and have a "ring" to them it you tap on them. E.g. a thin slab of lead with the same mass as a thick slab of concrete would be much more sound-dead. Whether or not a material is sound-dead (i.e. not easy to excite into resonance) is not just a matter of how dense it is. Composites tend to work much better, e.g. a thin sheet of lead resin-bonded to a slab of concrete would work _much_ better than a slab of concrete alone.
While it's evident that the Aspen speakers are well engineered,the only brands that spring to mind that use aluminum enclosures are from YG and Magico.While some will prefer one over the other,i'd say the Aspens "kicking their butt " is a bit of a stretch. It's too loose a generalisation to associate weight with quality.Quad electrostatics are among the finest speakers ever made,but don't weigh that much for example.
They had great speakers in ancient Egypt that weighed a lot. They also had heavy cables for connections that you can see in the stone illustrations inside the great temple buildings where they teach the DIY to the next generations.😁
@@djhmax09Hi.I'm Not familiar with them. While "seismic mass" is good for stability,the resonant behaviour is what's most critical.Something that's light and stiff will resonate at higher frequencies and store less energy If this is away from where the pressure is greatest ie the woofers,there'll less muddling and better bass definition when those resonances are shifted away from the woofers working range. It's the opposite end from making the enclosure as heavy as possible to try and prevent resonance in the first place. Nothing in nature can be free of resonance though,so the light and stiff approach has merit.Especially when considering that a heavy walled enclosure is harder to stop moving once it starts. As for "sound quality" ,with it being so subjective and there being so many other variables, it's difficult to say universally that a heavy speaker sounds inherently better. What's that saying? "it's dangerous to generalise",or something like that.
Whoa, some shade thrown there Magico (aluminum cabinets.) As for *mass* , transducers that have less mass is better, hence the planar midrange that PS Audio uses, and why all-planar/ribbon designs (e.g., Magnepan) sound so good.
And you can put it in a cardboard box. Lol. I was thinking about this as I listened to Paul, because I once did just this years ago, as a youngster, inpatient to build the enclosures. Of course, I used high quality cardboard boxes for canned milk, so they were rigid and sturdy, as cardboard goes. They did sound good (of sorts). Good enough to allow me to enjoy music during the few months it took me to build "proper" boxes out of plywood.
OK, I must agree, HOWEVER with the same drivers, crossovers, electronics, etc., would a heavier more rigid enclosure sound better than a lightweight more flexible one? (For any comparison to be valid one must *change only one thing* ... if comparing heavy to light enclosures one must change *ONLY* the enclosure.)
There is a lot more to it than just mass. A heavier cabinet can store more energy and release it more slowly, smearing the sound. The Liberty Bell weighs a Sh*t ton. You would want to use that as a speaker cabinet. It's about the intelligent use of materials.
Correlation does not imply causation. It's not that "(any) heavy materials make good speakers" but rather "good speakers are made from (particular) heavy materials". I bet there are suitable light yet rigid materials in the aerospace realm, but they're probably unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
I've had speakers with scanspeak beryllium and now borrenson planer ribbon tweeter and the prefer the ribbon in everyway. The ribbon gives much more air, more realistic cymbal crashes and soaring highs.
Noooooo... its cabinet design. Thats why for decades till now many diff brands use same drivers as other brands with very diff results. And there are exceptions to bigger heavier is better...
When I got the chance to experience large presentation speaker's for the first time I was blown away at how the bass loaded my room. Bookshelves and stereo sub's is pretty much all I knew about audio. AR Classic 30's 200lb shipping weight. After hearing them, immediately 3 pair of bookshelves went up for sale. Realizing that bookshelves/stereo sub's cannot match what the Classic 30's can do all by themselves. Long story short, I opened them up to find magnetic parts all throughout the binding post area. Not a 25.00 crossover but not much more to my eyes. Internal wiring seems very zip cordy. Clips on all drivers, no soldier. They never had the finesse of my best bookshelves. Four 10 inch driver's pounding down to 30hz. is amazing, apparently despite the cheap crossover's. Regular cottonlike dampening material inside. Even at 200lbs, sadly they were built to a price point. I've sent pic's to Danny and hopefully he can design something that will help these speaker's. I refuse to give up the bottom end I've fallen in love with. I think I have good bones for Danny to work with. Hoping he can work his magic and show me what these are actually capable of.
the owner of magico has a lot to say about mdf for speakers its pants. its only due to costing otherwise you would never use it yourself. same as MOST ps audio stuff priced as low as possible and its mostly compromised except MAYBE THE bhk just my opinion and ive heard a lot of it . the cheaper stuff is rubbish
@@nirodha35 Many, many speaker manufactures use MDF to build their speakers, and obviously MDF is not the only product used on the inside of a speaker enclosure to control sound.
Everyone Knows That Heavier Speakers 🔊 Give Us a Heavier Sound Isn’t That Right Paul…. I Got Custom Made Speakers Mounted In Pink Calacatta Marble Cabinets The Cabinets Alone Are $20 Grand Each By This Time I Don’t Care What The Speakers Sound Like Because They Are Heavy Baby
Most of the best Speakers, have Much Heavier Woofers... because they use stronger magnets, and stronger voice coils. This is where the BULK of the speaker weight comes from... and why these heavier speakers, are FAR superior to the Efficient "ECO-Woofer" Trash. Since the eco-woofers cant accelerate as fast, due to weaker magnetics, ...they suffer from Poor Cone Control, which causes Micro-Distortions. I have a pair of 2 way bookshelf speakers, that have 8" woofers... And they completely destroyed my larger 12" 3-Way house speakers, in every Metric. One of my single bookshelf speakers... weights almost double that of the 12" full tower 3-way speakers. Those eco woofer tower speakers, ended up in the Trash, the very next day.
My dream speakers at one time,,, I had the room for then and no more now,,,,, would be the Klispch monster 1960's or early 70's loaded horn driver cabinets with the 15" or 18" woofers that came with them. Been so long I cannot even remember anymore. They were so efficient that you only needed a healthy 6 to 8 watt RMS tube amp to run them. Easily had ( bought ) back in the early 2000's for around $2,100 bucks then for a pair. Bet 6 grand now.
I have a lot of vintage 1970's rebuilt speaker pairs ( not on site ) and they all weigh a bunch and with that being said, they all have the original factory quality crossovers and drivers in them. It was a hand in hand thing back in the day. Just about love them all. Moved a few the other day. Getting older. Used to move them around effortlessly. Uh, not as easy now. How did that happen?! Laughing.
Hey Paul all in Good Fun That Dude Mr. Carlson’s Lab He Looks Like He Is At Mission Control Trying To Land The Space Shuttle I Enjoy Watching The Kid With a Fluke Multimeter And a Soldering iron We Need More of These Kids Too Roll Up Their Sleeves And Just Go For It Figure It Out And Open Up a Stereo Amp Stick Your Face In It and To Hell If The Horse is Blind Get On and Ride Hey Kids This is Not Rocket Science
I own a pair of Fischer&Fischer SL550. German manufacture. They weight 120 kg each. Made of slate. Sounds great! (With Esotar Tweeter, Seas Midrange and Scanspeak Woofer)
B&W PM1s are heavy for their cabinet size so there could be something in this theory. Tried other speakers of similar size and cost and they don't match the PM1s for sound quality.
The design, components and build quality are most important. My Arendal 1723 towers weigh 111 lbs each and sound great. They put it all together in a heavy tower.
Heavier speakers will sound better than lighter speakers, if everything else is equal. For example, Vandersteen's "Kento" model speakers and "Seven" model speakers are available with and without granite bases (Richard Vandersteen calls it "bedrock"). The speakers are designed to be attached / fitted / bolted to the granite bases, giving the speakers the effective mass of both the speaker and its granite base, combined. So now we have a pair of speakers that can be set up with or without the granite bases, in the same room, with the same components (amps, turntable, DAC, etc). Everything is the same, except with or without the granite bases. The ones with the granite bases sound better. Here's why: No matter how professionally a speaker cabinet is designed, its woofers are going to shake the cabinet. When that happens, the midrange driver and the tweeter driver are going to shake. When they shake, they throw a less focused sonic image. With the granite bases, the speakers shake less, and you can hear the improved focus of voices, instruments, and everything else that is produced by the midrange driver and the tweeter drivers. So, yes, heavier is better. But just as quality interconnects will result in better sound quality, it is not the first thing you should prioritize for your stereo. As our host explained, the drivers and the crossovers are of the utmost importance. But once you have great crossovers and great drivers, then the icing on the cake is to reduce the amount of the speaker's cabinet shaking -- and that is where "mass" comes in.
My engineer brain says no.. and my subjective evaluation, owning relatively light Harbeths and Klipschorns, also says no. And explain why planars and electrostats are some of the best sounding speakers out there with practically only a frame holding em together.
I Want To Know If My Stereo Speakers Work In Reverse South of The Equator Paul And Should I Get a Reverse Polarity Switch If This Is The Case…. Signed Sleepless in Alabama
I guess that conversation I had with Paul in the PS Audio room at AXPONA was just a figment of my imagination. The memory of it is so vivid that I could swear it actually happened.
Sorry, but I don't care for this answer. It dodges the question entirely. OK, sure drivers and crossovers make the most difference. But the question was about speaker weight, not drivers and crossovers; it's no stretch to include an unsaid "all other things being equal" in the question. I'd much rather hear a discussion of how additional weight could impact sound, or why better sounding speakers tend to be heavier. I would say that "heavier" correlating to "better sounding" is a result of the design paradigm we use for speakers: a finite sized, moving transducer mounted in an inert container. This model wants minimal contribution from the container, i.e., a container that does not flex, move, or vibrate in any fashion. With current technologies, the easiest and cheapest ways to insure rigidity and stability almost always involve using more or heavier materials. Certainly new technologies -- say some type of super-rigid carbon fiber matrix covering an aerogel core -- might be even more rigid and stable and yet *very* light, breaking the correlation. And using something like aluminum, which adds weight, also breaks the model because the material itself "rings" more than many lighter alternatives like wood or plastic. Even moving to drivers, this same principle applies. A driver is again a moving transducer mounted in a stationary frame. The sound should come exclusively from the transducer, with no contribution from the frame. As of today, heavier frames tend to be more rigid as well.
Heavier is definitely better for theft! No one's walking out with my 175lb per speaker! Lol
Mine weighs that much, and the theft deterrent aspect has occurred to me also.
Driver quality is why I like Dynaudio standmounts - magnesium silicate woofers paired with metal coated soft dome tweeters... mated to quality cross-over parts and solid curved cabinets and all tuned to the Flechter-Munson frequency curve... they set the standard in standmount speakers imo.
I like Dynaudio too, I have a 5.1 system with Dynaudio and a REL sub.
The tweeter dome indeed is coated, but not with metal!
No idea where that comes from... 😲
Thanks Paul and your subscribers for such an awesome channel. Well, back to some rare Wilson Pickett mono and early stereo Lp's. My Shure V15 III cartridge and my recently serviced AR XA turntable helps me out daily. Installed The Q Up for it a few weeks ago. No more bolting too the turntable to lift the tonearm at the end of the record. Heavenly.
I bet a stone castle with Aspen drivers/crossovers built into the walls and a couple big subs would sound delightful.
Try taking a stone wall speaker to a trade show😂
As a 'trouble-shooter' assessing a gray-area type question, I often go to the extremes for guidance. In this case, one cabinet is made of concrete, the other a cabinet made of cardboard, or just drivers hanging in the air. I don't know the answer, but I think it helps with the puzzle. Hi Paul.
A lot of the old BBC designs simply used thin ply with bitumen dampening, and sounded great for it, Spendor BC1 as an example.
I am going to cast myself a pair of reinforced concrete speaker cabinets.
I think this could be the best DIY approach. I'd like to do reinforced concrete open baffle speakers for 80Hz up and use a pair of really good subs for the low end. If you like OB, they are the easiest thing to get right. Increased mass of the baffle is a good thing. You could even get fancy and have a curved front face.
@@user-od9iz9cv1w I was thinking the same thing. Applying the same finishing technics that are used in concrete counter tops you would have limitless design abilities.
Concrete (reinforced or not) is not a very sound-dead material at all. Concrete slabs easily resonate and have a "ring" to them it you tap on them.
E.g. a thin slab of lead with the same mass as a thick slab of concrete would be much more sound-dead. Whether or not a material is sound-dead (i.e. not easy to excite into resonance) is not just a matter of how dense it is. Composites tend to work much better, e.g. a thin sheet of lead resin-bonded to a slab of concrete would work _much_ better than a slab of concrete alone.
While it's evident that the Aspen speakers are well engineered,the only brands that spring to mind that use aluminum enclosures are from YG and Magico.While some will prefer one over the other,i'd say the Aspens "kicking their butt " is a bit of a stretch. It's too loose a generalisation to associate weight with quality.Quad electrostatics are among the finest speakers ever made,but don't weigh that much for example.
They had great speakers in ancient Egypt that weighed a lot. They also had heavy cables for connections that you can see in the stone illustrations inside the great temple buildings where they teach the DIY to the next generations.😁
@@franciscorompana2985 I'll eagerly anticipate the arrival of "Cleopatra " speakers and "Nefertiti" cables.🙂
@@oliverbeard7912 I hope the Nefertiti cables have not been remastered "from the original master tapes" by Mobile Fidelity.
I think Mon acoustics uses aluminum too
@@djhmax09Hi.I'm Not familiar with them. While "seismic mass" is good for stability,the resonant behaviour is what's most critical.Something that's light and stiff will resonate at higher frequencies and store less energy If this is away from where the pressure is greatest ie the woofers,there'll less muddling and better bass definition when those resonances are shifted away from the woofers working range. It's the opposite end from making the enclosure as heavy as possible to try and prevent resonance in the first place. Nothing in nature can be free of resonance though,so the light and stiff approach has merit.Especially when considering that a heavy walled enclosure is harder to stop moving once it starts. As for "sound quality" ,with it being so subjective and there being so many other variables, it's difficult to say universally that a heavy speaker sounds inherently better. What's that saying? "it's dangerous to generalise",or something like that.
Whoa, some shade thrown there Magico (aluminum cabinets.) As for *mass* , transducers that have less mass is better, hence the planar midrange that PS Audio uses, and why all-planar/ribbon designs (e.g., Magnepan) sound so good.
And yet the magico cabinets are still heavy!
And you can put it in a cardboard box. Lol. I was thinking about this as I listened to Paul, because I once did just this years ago, as a youngster, inpatient to build the enclosures. Of course, I used high quality cardboard boxes for canned milk, so they were rigid and sturdy, as cardboard goes. They did sound good (of sorts). Good enough to allow me to enjoy music during the few months it took me to build "proper" boxes out of plywood.
I remember, back in the day, Wharfedale featured acoustic-suspension speakers filled with SAND!
Construction varies, but a spkr cabinet must be acoustically inert🔊😎.
OK, I must agree, HOWEVER with the same drivers, crossovers, electronics, etc., would a heavier more rigid enclosure sound better than a lightweight more flexible one?
(For any comparison to be valid one must *change only one thing* ... if comparing heavy to light enclosures one must change *ONLY* the enclosure.)
Love your Octave Radio channel👌
Of course the drivers matter, but I remember when solid cabinet structure was a good indicator in general.
Is it possible to have the ultimate bass without a lot of weight?
Yes!
Heavier speaker, most likely more internal bracing, most likely more rigidity, most likely better sound.
Maggies are relatively light. Enough said.
More needs to be said and considered.
@@fakeklg "There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets”
@@glenncurry3041 clarification question: maggies are crap or great b/c they’re low mass?
Infinity IRS-IV. Fill it with sand until it's heavy enough to sound good🤔.
More serious. Damping, bracing and size all = weight
There is a lot more to it than just mass. A heavier cabinet can store more energy and release it more slowly, smearing the sound. The Liberty Bell weighs a Sh*t ton. You would want to use that as a speaker cabinet.
It's about the intelligent use of materials.
That should have been wouldn't.
RUclips edit function is on the fritz.
Correlation does not imply causation. It's not that "(any) heavy materials make good speakers" but rather "good speakers are made from (particular) heavy materials". I bet there are suitable light yet rigid materials in the aerospace realm, but they're probably unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
What is better?
planar magnetic tweeter or beryllium tweeter
2nd has better sound stage due to its shape and polar pattern
I've had speakers with scanspeak beryllium and now borrenson planer ribbon tweeter and the prefer the ribbon in everyway. The ribbon gives much more air, more realistic cymbal crashes and soaring highs.
Focal's Beryllium tweeters sound absolutely fantastic but I have never heard planar ones so I can't compare.
My klipsch rp504c centre speaker weights a tonne and it's good 😅
My old RC64 I is about 65lbs.
We cannot drive 100 wats speaker that weighs only 5 kg. The entire speaker will vibrate
Noooooo... its cabinet design. Thats why for decades till now many diff brands use same drivers as other brands with very diff results. And there are exceptions to bigger heavier is better...
Hahaha got a good laugh out of 1:50 . So who else makes speaker cabinets out of aluminium apart from Magico and Stenheim.
Genelec, Technics, Neuman, plenty of other speakers have had aluminium too I'd think
When I got the chance to experience large presentation speaker's for the first time I was blown away at how the bass loaded my room. Bookshelves and stereo sub's is pretty much all I knew about audio. AR Classic 30's 200lb shipping weight. After hearing them, immediately 3 pair of bookshelves went up for sale. Realizing that bookshelves/stereo sub's cannot match what the Classic 30's can do all by themselves. Long story short, I opened them up to find magnetic parts all throughout the binding post area. Not a 25.00 crossover but not much more to my eyes. Internal wiring seems very zip cordy. Clips on all drivers, no soldier. They never had the finesse of my best bookshelves. Four 10 inch driver's pounding down to 30hz. is amazing, apparently despite the cheap crossover's. Regular cottonlike dampening material inside. Even at 200lbs, sadly they were built to a price point. I've sent pic's to Danny and hopefully he can design something that will help these speaker's. I refuse to give up the bottom end I've fallen in love with. I think I have good bones for Danny to work with. Hoping he can work his magic and show me what these are actually capable of.
Yes.
WAMM 7 is heavy and I guess they sound good.
2 min...'Aspen F30 kicks butt of Aluminium Speakers'...Paul,was that a reference to Magico's ?
the owner of magico has a lot to say about mdf for speakers its pants. its only due to costing otherwise you would never use it yourself. same as MOST ps audio stuff priced as low as possible and its mostly compromised except MAYBE THE bhk just my opinion and ive heard a lot of it . the cheaper stuff is rubbish
"its pants" ??
@@stevet7487 rubbish
@@markwilson5262 So, "its pants" means rubbish?
@@stevet7487 correct common saying in uk
@@markwilson5262 Good to know. Thanks.
MDF wouldn't be my choice of material for speaker enclosures.
MDF sucks…. Literally: it sucks the life out of music
Why?
@@nirodha35 How come?
@@nirodha35
Many, many speaker manufactures use MDF to build their speakers, and obviously MDF is not the only product used on the inside of a speaker enclosure to control sound.
@@Mark-lq3sb it is cheap
Everyone Knows That Heavier Speakers 🔊 Give Us a Heavier Sound
Isn’t That Right Paul….
I Got Custom Made Speakers Mounted In
Pink Calacatta Marble
Cabinets The Cabinets Alone Are $20 Grand Each
By This Time I Don’t Care
What The Speakers Sound Like Because They Are Heavy Baby
Have you checked the water swirl in your toilet yet?
Just like I said all cabinet design...
"The best speaker cabinet is a 2" thick lead box with no leaks" - someone from JBL about 30 years ago. LOL
Most of the best Speakers, have Much Heavier Woofers... because they use stronger magnets, and stronger voice coils. This is where the BULK of the speaker weight comes from... and why these heavier speakers, are FAR superior to the Efficient "ECO-Woofer" Trash. Since the eco-woofers cant accelerate as fast, due to weaker magnetics, ...they suffer from Poor Cone Control, which causes Micro-Distortions.
I have a pair of 2 way bookshelf speakers, that have 8" woofers... And they completely destroyed my larger 12" 3-Way house speakers, in every Metric. One of my single bookshelf speakers... weights almost double that of the 12" full tower 3-way speakers. Those eco woofer tower speakers, ended up in the Trash, the very next day.
Let's see....ultimate sound from planar magnetics....hmmmmm...wonder why I Love and use Magna- planars....
My dream speakers at one time,,, I had the room for then and no more now,,,,, would be the Klispch monster 1960's or early 70's loaded horn driver cabinets with the 15" or 18" woofers that came with them. Been so long I cannot even remember anymore. They were so efficient that you only needed a healthy 6 to 8 watt RMS tube amp to run them. Easily had ( bought ) back in the early 2000's for around $2,100 bucks then for a pair. Bet 6 grand now.
I have a lot of vintage 1970's rebuilt speaker pairs ( not on site ) and they all weigh a bunch and with that being said, they all have the original factory quality crossovers and drivers in them. It was a hand in hand thing back in the day. Just about love them all. Moved a few the other day. Getting older. Used to move them around effortlessly. Uh, not as easy now. How did that happen?! Laughing.
Anyway really digging this channel! So much fun and the comments are gold to. Love it!
Yes, open up your speakers and look for the lead lined in the box.
Well should I pour some concrete down inside my Aspen's?
Hey Paul all in Good Fun
That Dude
Mr. Carlson’s Lab
He Looks Like He Is At Mission Control Trying To
Land The Space Shuttle
I Enjoy Watching
The Kid With a Fluke
Multimeter And a
Soldering iron
We Need More of These Kids Too Roll Up Their Sleeves And Just Go For It
Figure It Out And Open Up a Stereo Amp
Stick Your Face In It
and To Hell If
The Horse is Blind
Get On and Ride
Hey Kids
This is Not Rocket Science
Patiently waiting for that water swirl test.............
bigger truck makes more shaking of my house, and I hear bass then...
With bicycle there's none of bass that I can hear... So yeah... Bass is
heavy xD
I own a pair of Fischer&Fischer SL550. German manufacture. They weight 120 kg each. Made of slate. Sounds great! (With Esotar Tweeter, Seas Midrange and Scanspeak Woofer)
Everything matters.
Acora uses granite cabinets. They sound terrific. I highly doubt they'd sound the same in MDF.
My Paradigm Studio 100 v2’s weigh 110lbs each and they sound like it. Big and heavy sound stage
B&W PM1s are heavy for their cabinet size so there could be something in this theory. Tried other speakers of similar size and cost and they don't match the PM1s for sound quality.
The design, components and build quality are most important. My Arendal 1723 towers weigh 111 lbs each and sound great. They put it all together in a heavy tower.
Heavier speakers will sound better than lighter speakers, if everything else is equal.
For example, Vandersteen's "Kento" model speakers and "Seven" model speakers are available with and without granite bases (Richard Vandersteen calls it "bedrock"). The speakers are designed to be attached / fitted / bolted to the granite bases, giving the speakers the effective mass of both the speaker and its granite base, combined.
So now we have a pair of speakers that can be set up with or without the granite bases, in the same room, with the same components (amps, turntable, DAC, etc). Everything is the same, except with or without the granite bases. The ones with the granite bases sound better. Here's why:
No matter how professionally a speaker cabinet is designed, its woofers are going to shake the cabinet. When that happens, the midrange driver and the tweeter driver are going to shake. When they shake, they throw a less focused sonic image.
With the granite bases, the speakers shake less, and you can hear the improved focus of voices, instruments, and everything else that is produced by the midrange driver and the tweeter drivers.
So, yes, heavier is better.
But just as quality interconnects will result in better sound quality, it is not the first thing you should prioritize for your stereo. As our host explained, the drivers and the crossovers are of the utmost importance. But once you have great crossovers and great drivers, then the icing on the cake is to reduce the amount of the speaker's cabinet shaking -- and that is where "mass" comes in.
Explain the existence of headphones.
My engineer brain says no.. and my subjective evaluation, owning relatively light Harbeths and Klipschorns, also says no. And explain why planars and electrostats are some of the best sounding speakers out there with practically only a frame holding em together.
@@ocelotxp "Explain the existence of headphones."
Headphone do not exist. Do not believe what you see or have placed on your head.
How about concrete speaker boxes? If nothing else they are kind of theft proof.
magico might disagree with a lot of that
Thank you very much sir for explaining the matter properly.
I Want To Know If My Stereo Speakers Work In Reverse South of
The Equator Paul And Should I Get a Reverse Polarity Switch If This Is The Case….
Signed
Sleepless in
Alabama
To check, flush your toilet and see which way the water swirls.
Unlike PS Audio, YG and Magico go to audio shows. I can attest that they sound superb. Aspens? Who knows? I'll never have a chance to hear them.
PS Audio goes to audio shows.
I guess that conversation I had with Paul in the PS Audio room at AXPONA was just a figment of my imagination. The memory of it is so vivid that I could swear it actually happened.
Sorry, but I don't care for this answer. It dodges the question entirely. OK, sure drivers and crossovers make the most difference. But the question was about speaker weight, not drivers and crossovers; it's no stretch to include an unsaid "all other things being equal" in the question. I'd much rather hear a discussion of how additional weight could impact sound, or why better sounding speakers tend to be heavier.
I would say that "heavier" correlating to "better sounding" is a result of the design paradigm we use for speakers: a finite sized, moving transducer mounted in an inert container. This model wants minimal contribution from the container, i.e., a container that does not flex, move, or vibrate in any fashion. With current technologies, the easiest and cheapest ways to insure rigidity and stability almost always involve using more or heavier materials. Certainly new technologies -- say some type of super-rigid carbon fiber matrix covering an aerogel core -- might be even more rigid and stable and yet *very* light, breaking the correlation. And using something like aluminum, which adds weight, also breaks the model because the material itself "rings" more than many lighter alternatives like wood or plastic. Even moving to drivers, this same principle applies. A driver is again a moving transducer mounted in a stationary frame. The sound should come exclusively from the transducer, with no contribution from the frame. As of today, heavier frames tend to be more rigid as well.
If this statement held truth, there wouldn’t be any such thing as headphones
Totally different way of tricking your brain
Well yes my concrete headphones are heavy man