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RE: Measurements are not equivalent to perception

>The response curves at the different locations show differences of up to 5 dB, if you had two loudspeakers having two of these different curves as on-axis response you would not doubt for a second that they will sound different.

Yes, but as Toole points out, the brain is remarkably good at deconvolving the contributions of the room and the original source. Comb filtering of a signal fed to a loudspeaker doesn't sound at all like comb filtering from natural reflections. The brain seems to integrate multiple arrivals to evaluate timbre, and to use the comb filtering to judge the nature of the acoustic space and position of the source instead. In fact, reflections seem to increase the ear's sensitivity to resonances in the source, by IIRC more than 10 dB.

So, in practice, frequency response distortions in a loudspeaker will be heard as such, whereas frequency response distortions introduced by a room may not be, depending on their nature.

Also, arguably, there are factors in the perception of sound in a concert hall that are invariant with respect to the sort of response variation to which you refer. If there weren't, we wouldn't be able to tell immediately whether we were listening to live or reproduced music. Arguably, some loudspeakers do a better job of reproducing the cues that suggest that we are in a concert hall. OK, knock out the "arguably" since some loudspeakers clearly do. So while we can't create "you are there" realism, we can get part of the way there.


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