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RE: Could you do a review of a borrowed product?

Posted by RGA (R) on June 6, 2014 at 20:40:14

In Reply to: RE: Could you do a review of a borrowed product? posted by josh358 on June 5, 2014 at 17:56:08:

I don't think people should be buying based on a frequency plot which changes in every room at every distance anyway. I have good and not so good measured speakers come through here - the best have been the ones that didn't look too good in Stereophile. Not to mention what their reviewers have liked and have bought over the years.

I don't buy Magnepan's argument about worrying over being copied. That is the issue here. I have the great measuring LS-50 here and my next speaker when I can pull the money together is going to be the Audio Note E/Spx HE Alnico (which won Product of the Year in Asia). But the measured results were not too good at Stereophile. And I doubt Audio Note much cares. here in Hong Kong they were being sold at a dealer along with speakers that are one of John Mark's dream speaker and will measure superbly. The AN E is still being sold the other has been dropped because they couldn't sell any of them against the E. They can't keep up with demand on them...and that's with very middling Stereophile measurements. Magnepan will sell regardless of the plots.

People who buy or consider to drop speakers off their list based mainly on measurements probably aren't buying this sort of stuff anyway (and IMO wouldn't know quality sound if the Philharmonic played outside their window.

While I am not personally a fan of the Magnepan sound I do get why people are fans of them - and really if you love the sound of Magnepan and it turned out that the measurements "supposedly" stunk would that change anything? Indeed, years before the AN E was measured I said - in order for them to sound better than the typical boxed slim line (2-5 six inch woofers under some sort of metal tweeter that glut the audio market) the AN E would have to measure significantly differently than those (like designed) speakers. And since those "like design" speakers were supposedly considered to measure well - then the AN E would have to measure poorly by those same criteria. But since the so called deemed "good measuring" speakers sound quite a LOT WORSE than the AN E then it was easy for me to chuck that part of Stereophile's analysis - since they also didn't perform pair matching measurements, distortion measurements. Measuring one speaker mid room is a waste of time.

The flagship B&W and Quad 2905 were found by Ken Kessler to be 2.9 and 5.9db OFF from each other. The dealer wants to claim the latter is one sample but of course he would. By measuring one speaker you are not measuring a "stereo system" you are measuring mono. Big fat waste of time - but it's cheaper and faster so let's do that.

Dipoles can't be measured properly so why measure the frequency - put something else in like pair matching and distortion. One size measurements doesn't fit all.

Edits: 06/06/14 06/06/14

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