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In Reply to: RE: Will magazines ever improve their measurements in the near future? posted by das@soundstage.com on October 31, 2009 at 12:04:34
I do not think more measurements would be of any use to the average audiophile. Most do not have the skills to interpret correctly the meaning of a graph. It is also noteworthy that nobody actually found a way to characterize the "musical" or "dynamic" quality of a loudspeaker by measurements alone.
This is particularly evident when Stereophile reviews a speaker where the listener likes what he hears while JA gathers and interpret catastrophic engineering flaws of the same speaker.
Floyd Toole (at least when with the NRC) worked on this aspect for quite a long time, and frustrating as it may be (from an R&D perspective), ultimate sound quality still cannot be measured accurately in a repeatable manner.
I remember reading that Toole (I'm not sure if it was with NRC or Harman) ran listening tests of an ugly speaker VS a beautiful one, but it clearly demonstrated that people do listen with their eyes, as the ugly speaker did not sound as good as the other one.
On measurements, a simple impedance sweep can tells a lot if you know how to read the curve, but it's hardly entertaining from a reader's perspective.
I guess it all brews down to the intent of the designer, and what the goal was (or budget, which has a tremendous impact on design), and to the manufacturer's perception of value relative to curves and measurements.
Another contradiction of this hobby is that some very nicely engineered products (i-e any PSB speaker) do not scale high of the audiophile excitement scale.
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