The 6B's look like nice speakers, but what is with the 82 db sensitivity? You would need a really powerful amp to get these things to hit hard, and they are only rated for up to 200 watts (continuous, I am assuming). Am I missing something here, because this wouldn't seem to be great for a powerful home theater sound system. How loud can these get before some serious distortion and clipping set in?
Hello there,
When we were designing these speakers we were faced with a choice, we either had to sacrifice a bit of sensitivity to get the bass response we wanted (down to 42 Hz at -6dB), or reduce the bass response to get more sensitivity. We chose option A because we felt we wanted to offer a speaker that provided the best sound possible.
One thing to keep in mind is that our sensitivity ratings are anechoic while some other speaker manufacturers will use a half space sensitivity rating (which takes into account reflections from a wall) to boost their sensitivity specs.
Another thing to remember is that SPL is not only a function of the amount of power your amp has, but also how far away you are from the speaker. If you were one meter away from the speaker you would only need 125 watts to hit 100 dB from the 6B and you would still have 3 dB of headroom left.
For a more real world scenario, if you were 4 meters away and had a 125 watt/channel amp you should be able to push them to about 90 dB before running into clipping, which for my ears is plenty loud.
Finally our speaker engineer notes that the 24mm voice coil winding length that we use handles peaks quite well. So our speakers will go as loud on "program material" as a speaker that's around 5dB more sensitive.
But if you really need a speaker that will hit 110 dB peaks cleanly then I would say that you should consider a more sensitive speaker.
Hope that helps but please let me know if you have any other questions!
