The audio industry is full of ambiguity, leading to common misconceptions by consumers, and thus marketing opportunities by manufacturers. Additionally, the unknowing consumer tends to make their own assumptions, not based on engineering principals, or logical ones for that matter, but on their ideas as to what is right and wrong based on propaganda printed on sales literature or spewed by sales people. Listed below are some of the common misconceptions in audio. It is my hope to shed some light on these topics and minimize their ambiguous nature. This speaker is better than the other one because it plays louder.
Efficiency has little to do with how well a speaker is going to sound.
In most cases, the more efficient design represents a compromise of performance and fidelity for efficiency. High efficiency is usually accomplished by using a horn loaded driver and thus resulting in compression of soundstage, off axis response and smoothness. However, more efficient designs are better suited for use with Receivers due to their power supply and sustained output current limitations, leaving the better, no compromise designs for the more ample and tastier separates. More money does not always guarantee better performance. In addition, there are many cases where a bookshelf speaker from a particular company, outperforms the larger more expensive model from the same series.