I was re-reading Chapter 0 of Dickason's Loudspeaker Design Cookbook 7 tonight. That chapter is an introductory chapter that focuses on the design of the speakers themselves. There was an example of the author designing an evolution of 10 different 10" speakers, changing various parameters one at a time like voice coil length, spider stiffness, and magnet sizes to demonstrate their effects. Towards the end, he starts changing some parameters that effect speaker durability, such as venting the speaker pole to help dissipate heat. It really got me thinking about all the trade-offs that designers need to suffer in order to get a speaker that meets efficiency, power, and durability considerations.
I wonder how many awesome sounding speaker prototypes are sitting on the shelves at Celestion and Eminence because they couldn't handle the rigors of 1000 hours at stage volume, or were too expensive to sell. I imagine that designing a speaker to last a few minutes during the profiling process could allow for some interesting results not possible when designing a speaker for a road amp. Maybe someone with a little pull like @lonestargtr could borrow a few of these prototypes for profiling. Also, I known @sinmix is very interested in the speaker part of the overall sound. This idea seems right up his alley.
Just a thought.
