That's not exactly what he said. He said, and I quote, "...that high-impedance, high sensitivity design design allows a speaker to be driven to high SPLs with very few watts and sound convincingly lifelike, at least with some kinds of music. The downside is that neutrality, low frequency extension, and dispersion can become compromised. By contrast, by going the low-sensitivity, low-impedance route, a speaker designer can minimize coloration and maximize bass extension for a given enclosure size. The downside is that the speaker can then make excessive demands for current from the amplifier and perhaps sound lifeless. You pays your money, you makes your choice."
Notice, he said it "CAN" become colored, not that it will. With high efficiency designs, it takes extremely good design and build quality to sound neutral, much more so then low efficiency designs. This costs a lot more money. Also, to get good, full sounding bass extension requires very big, well built and well braced boxes or horns, which take up a lot of space and are also expensive. Many high sensitivity designs take shortcuts aroud these things and make less then ideal high efficiency designs to make them affordable and small enough to fit in a somewhat typical living room. These designs are, indeed, colored, although the trade-offs may well be worthwhile because of the life-like dynamics and great fine detail. Really big, expensive designs have no more coloration then most lower efficiency designs, but take up much more space and cost a lot more. Having it all has it's cost.
Dave
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