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In Reply to: RE: Measurements vs. Reviewers posted by Peter Breuninger on August 19, 2015 at 14:01:11
Without measurements to back it up a review is a practically useless anecdote.
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As you can tell from this long discussion, I'm on the side of measurements. Unfortunately most reviewers don't have access to these tools. But I do believe a review can still be useful especially from a reviewer who has written often. You can get a sense of his biases over a long period and use this to know what he's hearing. And I do believe there have been a few really good subjective reviewers such as Gordon Holt and recently Roy Gregory who you can glean tons of info from.
Something like Dayton Omnimic is easy to use and can be purchased on Amazon for $300. I think every audiophile should be equipped to make in-room acoustic measurements and should use them to help system/room setup and optimization. But I know that few do.
If I were reviewing speakers, I would want to make measurements to help with placement and to get the most out of them.
It's not enough. As Doug Schneider has written in this discussion it needs lots of measurements and someone who knows how to interpret them. Otherwise designing or criticizing speakers would be a snap.
You said most reviewers don't have access to measurement tools, which is nonsense. For acoustic measurements, any reviewer has access to suitable tools.
You don't need an anechoic chamber. A chamber is surely nice, but reviewers like John Atkinson and Martin Colloms are able to make useful measurements without one. And more importantly, most speaker designers manage to do OK without one as well.
I'm not even asking for reviewers to possess the engineering background necessary to interpret a full suite of measurements. If all reviewers would just use basic in-room FR measurements to optimize speaker positioning, and then include an in-room measurement with comparison to their reference speakers, we would be a lot better off.
In his speaker reviews, John Atkinson often includes a spatially averaged in-room response compared to another reference. This one plot is more useful than all his other loudspeaker measurements combined, because it correlates best with his subjective impressions. Also, by comparing and contrasting the measurements of various speakers in the same room, you can separate the speakers' signature from the room's signature. I don't know why every reviewer doesn't do this.
I'd actually like measurements we usually don't see and could be hard to do. In one case I'd like to see the transfer function of each driver and its crossover, that is the frequency response of an isolated driver/crossover combo.
Why so hard on opinion only reviewers, a tier one reviewer opinion trumps all , no need to listen just buy ..
:)
I do find some purely subjective reviews to be useful as long as they include comparisons with other equipment of similar design & price or with references I'm familiar with. When that's lacking as well, it's hard to call it a review.
I agree with you.
Doug Schneider
SoundStage!
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