actually...i did mean dB! i should've listened to my intuition. i thought 100 dBs seemed pretty loud.

My point was, in general, what would be a good rule-of-thumb cutoff to gauge a speaker's performance based on it's frequency graph? I can certainly see that output levels roll off at low frequency but, for a given frequency, is a 10 dB drop "a lot" or will i still hear reasonable output at that frequency?

for instance, the M3 shows ~74dB output at 40hz (compared to 84-88dB for frequencies higher than 100hz). can i still hear the 40hz or does this much of a drop pretty much make it impossible to hear?