Your speaker's voice. (Sight and Sound).(selecting audio speakers)(Brief Article)

Suppose had to sing Mimi one moment, Rodolfo the next -- then change into a trombone, a fiddle or maybe a whole orchestra. Impossible? It's what your loudspeakers do. They must impersonate all the voices and instruments in the music you listen to.

Given the complexity of this task, speakers are the most problematic area of audio design. Purely electronic components, such as amplifiers or CD players, can be optimized by rational engineering calculations. But mere engineering logic doesn't suffice when it comes to loudspeakers, for they inhabit an uncertain realm where electronics, mechanics and the ancient craft of musical instrument-building overlap.

No two speakers sound quite alike: each has its own tonal flavor. So picking a pair of speakers takes a bit of critical discernment, and you have to choose them as carefully as you would a piano or violin. Some speakers are bright, etching tonal detail with analytic precision. Others -- a minority these days -- are notable for the warmth and smoothness of their sound.

Such variance in the character of speakers is by no means accidental. On the contrary. Loudspeakers are carefully "voiced" in much the way different makes of piano are voiced to give them their distinctive attributes. Tonal individuality is deliberately -- sometimes cynically -- imparted to a given speaker model to aim at a particular market. For instance, those bright, aggressive speakers that are now in vogue are mainly intended for home theaters, lending immediacy to dialogue and enhancing sound effects in films; such speakers are also well suited to jazz and rock instruments and to pop vocalists.

The current prevalence of movie- and rock-oriented speakers has left classically inclined listeners feeling abandoned. Yet a brief look at recent designs offers reassurance. Plenty of speakers still are voiced to blend orchestral texture into coherent sonority, conveying the warmth and solidity of the massed body of strings that forms the sonic basis of the symphonic repertoire. Unlike their more aggressive counterparts, they seem not to throw the music at you but to let it expand naturally into the listening space. By the same token, they restrain unduly forward vocal projection and put the opera stage at a proper acoustic distance.

The technical specifications given for a speaker may tell of its range and power capacity, but they give little or no clue to these subtler aspects of voicing. The only way to ascertain what a speaker really sounds like is to listen.

A few guidelines may be helpful for the critical evaluation of any speaker. By far the most revealing orchestral sound is that of string instruments. Listen in particular for the silky sheen of violins. It should have no trace of stridency even at full concert volume -- none of the hard, glassy edge that marks a "rock speaker" deliberately voiced to sound ...