One possibility is that he was talking about the EXECUTION of poor designs, and that it may be harder to implement a sensitive speaker design well, rather than something intrinsic in the nature of sensitive speakers.

I guess the motivation for me asking this is to understand if a mongo power amp-less sensitive speaker setup is intrinsically BETTER than a sensitive speaker-2 watt SET setup.

ALl the less sensitive speakers I have heard sound dead to me, but that could be because they are being driven by poor solid state amps. I am not sure. ALso, there seems to be a new rediscovery of sensitive speakers in the pages of stereophile, etc, where a 91 DB speaker is called "sensitive" nowadays, and the 2-3 db gainns over the average sensitivity (which I suppose is 88 db) are much touted.

Thanx everyone for shedding more light on this.
-akhilesh