KV / Gearing choices

[glassdoctor]

The topic really isn't W=VxA... that's pretty clear cut, voltage is your friend. It's much better/more efficient to make power with volts rather than current. But that's not what we're talking about.

The question here is for a given voltage application (4s lipo for example), and "class" of motor (Neu 1515), with the only variable being the wind of the motor... what's the better way to go:

higher kv and lower gear?
lower kv and gear up?

The idea is that you can take the 1500, 1700, 2200, 2600kv motors and get them to run the same in the same car by using the gear ratio to compensate for the rpm differences. But which one is better? more efficient? how big a difference is there exactly?

It's not easy to get answers here.. I even tried to ask the guys at DMA (distributor for Neu motors) this and didn't get anything from them. I even tried to use airplane speak... props size and pitch etc and I got the feeling the guy I was talking to had no idea what was better etc....

I'm sure Steve Neu could shed some light on this if he understood what we wanted to know....