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In Reply to: RE: Those darn measurements ! posted by J. Phelan on June 23, 2017 at 15:17:03
It seems like every time there is a controversial Stereophile loudspeaker review, whether it was a negative review or a positive review with bad measurements, the review is lacking an in-room response measurement. OK, maybe not every time, but it always seems to be lacking when they're reviewing a controversial speaker that is either designed for near wall placement, or employs directivity control.
I don't need an in-room measurement for conventional box speakers designed for placement away from walls with dome tweeters and cone midranges & woofers, because I know from experience how their pseudo-anechoic measurements translate. But in cases like Sjöfn The Clue and the Volti Rival, I think the in-room measurement tells you more than the pseudo-anechoic measurement.
With the Volti Rival, if all you look at is the nearfield, on-axis, pseudo-anechoic response, you might be unimpressed. But if you assume this speaker is intended to be placed in a relatively live, untreated room where power response matters most, a lot of the problems go away. Those ragged looking peaks and valleys in the lower treble are reversed off-axis. Similarly, the rising treble response on-axis is countered by narrowing dispersion off-axis. So I would expect that the power response of the midrange + tweeter is a lot flatter than you might think.
The real mystery here is the level mismatch between the woofer and the other drive units, which seems to be about 5 dB. That should be an easily audible flaw, so it's a bit strange for Ken to say that the speaker has no house sound, compared to his DeVore's. An in-room measurement showing the response of the Volti vs. the DeVore in Ken's room would shed a lot of light on that.
Follow Ups:
the volti measurements is so bad, I cannot believe my eye.
poor consumers having to live with such coloured system
The Volti has the typical FM curve loved by many , it wont sound "bad" to most , it will sound powerful and detailed as not many "philes" and "reviewers" are sensitive to timbre and cabinet colorations , especially if not playing acoustic instruments , Symphony or classical piano. The Volti IMO, would be dynamic on classic rock for eg and if paired to the right SET will have jump , bass drive without bloat and plenty detail ..The Volti's will be room and amplifier sensitive thou, due to the massive tilt but its no where as bad as the Odeons mentioned above , those should sound bad regardless..
JA closing comments on the Odeons where hillarious , Translated , Your wife is fat and ugly but man can she cook...
:)
Regards
Edits: 07/02/17 07/02/17 07/02/17
agreed, in-room will tell far more than the pseudo-anechoic response. However, it means that more than most YMMV due to everyone having different rooms with differents size, shape, construction and damping.
So, it's not the need of a (real) echo-free room, it's the opposite.Each speaker is different -testers should know this by now !
Edits: 06/24/17
Near-field pseudo-anechoic measurements have the advantage of being largely repeatable by different people in different settings, and for conventional designs at least, I can usually tell just by looking at the measurements whether I'm going to have a generally favorable or unfavorable listening impression. However, they don't tell me what the reviewer heard.
When I see an in-room measurement of the speaker under review, compared to the reviewer's reference(s), that helps me put the reviewer's listening impressions into context. It's also important to understand what kind of response you'll get in the far field from dipoles, bipoles, horns, panels, arrays, etc. And when speakers are designed for special room placement, it's the only way to know whether they are working as intended.
Dipole speakers, for example, are designed with room acoustics in mind.
Even then, you'll get varying opinions as how to best leverage a dipole. Arnie Nudell favors tall line sources while Siggy Linkwitz prefers a compact point source approach.
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