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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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In Reply to: RE: Measurements vs. Reviewers posted by hahax@verizon.net on August 19, 2015 at 20:54:21:
Hypothetically, if I auditioned these W-B Square One speakers and liked them, and then I saw the measurements, I would want to go back for another round of listening with different source material chosen to be more sensitive to the upper midrange response in particular. I would try to listen for artifacts from that 1 KHz on-axis resonance and see if I could detect a general midrange coloration resulting from that "smile" shaped response from 100 Hz to 1 KHz. Maybe it would change my listening impressions, maybe it wouldn't. A lot depends on the in-room response, so I would also want to measure that. For example, the variations in the on-axis response above 1 KHz look like they will be offset by a reverse pattern above and below the horizontal plane, so I'll bet the power response is pretty flat above 1 KHz. It really is a shame that no in-room measurements were made for this speaker. I would particularly like to see a measurement taken in John Marks' room and compared to his reference speakers.
My position is that measurements are tools, not arbiters of sound quality. Regardless of what the measurements say, the only way to really know whether a component is high fidelity or poor fidelity is to listen to it.
Usually, the systems that sound the most real to me are built with components that measure reasonably well, but may not have the most impressive looking measurements in their class.
The world seems to be full of components that ace a typical suite of bench tests but don't sound real and are not high fidelity. This observation seems to be most common with digital electronics, and common with amplifiers, but sometimes with speakers too. It's very common for audiophiles (and some speaker designers) to focus almost exclusively on the near field, on-axis, pseudo-anechoic response. Which is unfortunate since that particular measurement doesn't tell you much about how a speaker will sound in the far field in a typical room.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Measurements vs. Reviewers - Dave_K 05:10:28 08/20/15 (2)
- RE: Measurements vs. Reviewers - A.Wayne 05:55:25 08/20/15 (1)
- "worthy" is the key word - Dave_K 08:55:46 08/20/15 (0)
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