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In Reply to: RE: Exactly posted by robert.gaboury@videotron.ca on November 03, 2009 at 06:05:39
> 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.
It is unfortunate that the "I know nothing but I hear everything" set has so overrun the audiophile world. Their level of hostility to knowledge, experiment and measurement seems to be increasing.
> 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 think that you misrepresent Toole's work. The reports of his work that I have seen shown that listeners generally found that speakers that measure well were preferred to speakers that had serious flaws in measured frequency response or exhibited resonances.
> 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.
If I'm going to spend a few thousand dollars on a pair of speakers, I appreciate very much getting solid information to narrow the field to a manageable number of products and show me what I can get at a particular price level.
> 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.
PSB is still in business selling to rational consumers. Some of those consumers are reading Stereophile to get some factual information to make buying decisions.
Bill
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