On Jan 25, 10:35*am, " sho...@trailing-
edge.com wrote:
I like listening to shortwave and ham stuff using biggish speakers.
Little speakers like computer speakers sound chintzy to my ears.

As examples, I have an old 50's Caliphone record player/PA system that
has two remote 15" speakers and I just love the way my shortwave and
ham stuff sounds through these speakers. I also have some Electovoice
EV5's (again, big old mellow speakers) and I love the way things sound
through these.

A little bit more insight: I went shopping for speakers and found that
almost all 12" speakers have a natural responsive range of a little
under 100Hz to a little over 3kHz when installed in a simple box (no
ports. etc.)

This is, through no strange coincidence, exactly the frequency range
that I want to listen to :-).

I ended up picking a 12" Jensen musical instrument speaker which
seemed to have a frequency response curve remarkably like all the
other 12" speakers out there. There were some 12" PA speakers but
those seemed to be aimed at power handling capabilities in the
hundreds of watts (approaching a kilowatt!) and price kept me away
from them (although it's very likely they would work as well and
probably stand up to nearly infinite abuse.)

For non-hi-fi radio listening, I think there's a perfect match going
on there. I feel (no proof, just my ears) that hi-fi speakers that try
to go higher than a few kHz are reproducing stuff coming out of my
radio that I never wanted to hear to begin with.

Looking at it, I have a hard time seeing how chintzy little computer
speakers can legibly reproduce speach etc. at all! I'm guessing they
don't get any flat response at all over the fundamentals of male
speech and are only good on the harmonics. Maybe in a perfect world
that's you need for legible reproduction but with all the noise and
scratch on the HF bands it does not cut the mustard with my ears.

Tim N3QE