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Amazing

Posted by Jon Risch (B) on February 20, 2007 at 21:20:24

In Reply to: "..you are more likely to be mislead or confused by measurement results ..." -- Condecending attitude toward audiophiles posted by Richard BassNut Greene on February 19, 2007 at 08:36:04:

What is amazing is how ready you are to twist things around to seem more controversial.

The other interesting thing is your use of 'incremental logic', where you start making statements that start out logical, but each one gets a little further from the facts of the matter at hand, until we end up where your convoluted train of logic deliver's us: YOUR opinion turned into some sort of psuedo-logical fact.

For instance, take this gem:
"Measurements will guide you toward speakers that are MORE LIKELY to sound above average when you hear them at home."

Sounds eminently logical, but in reality, it sucks.

I stand by my post, those unfamilair with acoustic measurements are more likely to be confused or mislead tham aided by the typical batch of loudspeaker measurements.

You are, in essence, saying that the measurements can only help, that somehow, folks without the background and experience with acoustic measurements are going to be able to make useful judgements from simply looking at a frequency response curve, at a dispersion plot, at an impedance curve, etc.,

While this might be true to a limited extent if all we were going to study was whether or not a transistor radio speaker measured AND sounded worse than a Polk, that is a somewhat trivial pairing as an example. But once we get down to the very much more subtle measured differences between mid-fi speaker systems, even the professionals are going to be hard-pressed to make any solid sense out of the measurement data, and CERTAINLY, no professional I know would be so foolish as to try and judge a speaker, or try to determine whether or not any given speaker SOUNDED better than another, simply by looking at measurements taken by someone else.

And THAT is what you are saying, that folks can dismiss a given speaker strictly due to their inexperienced judgement based on a FR curve or a polar plot taken via who-knows-what-method.

Once we get above the level of a trivial pairing, NO WAY!

Yet this is exactly what you say:
" Most important: Measurements may help an audiophile separate above-average speakers from below-average speakers, and that can really help an audiophile decide what speakers he will audition before his next purchase. "

I say again, NO WAY!

Richard stated:
" For one example: I have found over many years that step-response, as measured by John Atkinson at Stereophile, correlates well with my own subjective speaker opinions of speakers I have borrowed for an audition at home, at least for the near field speaker positions I use at home. "

Good for you Richard, but what about the rest of the world, with THEIR particular system and components? How many people listen near-field? How has your subjective opinion been shown to correlate with anyone else's?

Richard stated:
" On axis anechoic frequency response shows the ability of a speaker to accurately reproduce the input signal. "

Sez who? This is so laughably inaccurate a statement, that I can't even begin to explain. On axis FR may tell us something, it can even tell us more than one thing if done a certain way, but a FR plot BY ITSELF actually can fool us into thinking that a speaker is doing more/better than it really is.
All kinds of things can 'hide' in a typical 1/3 octave averaged FR plot, including speaker component resonances, cabinet or vent resonances, distortion, cone or diaphragm break-up, poor transient response, baffle diffraction, etc., etc.
So much for "accurately reproducing the input signal".

Richard stated:
" Room reflections in a real room will make the frequency response at the listeners ears worse, compared with on-axis anechoic measurements ... but there is no reason to design speakers with a poor on-axis frequency response and hope the room reflections will make the sound more accurate by the time it reaches the listener's ears! '

A red herring. A so-called poor FR just might be a real and honest FR curve, showing better than average phase behavior, transient response and low distortion, all the while looking much worse than a smoothed, homgenized FR curve, one with poor phase behavior, lousy transient response, and high levels of higher order distortions.

Richard stated:
" There may be debates over what amount of high freuency roll-off over 2kHz sounds natural, and over the need for bass ramp-up under 80Hz. (because a "flat" frequency response at frequency extremes doesn't sound flat to most listeners) ... but there is little debate over the desire for a flat frequency response in the 80-2000Hz, range. "

Actually, you have this one wrong too, as a FR that measured flat from 80 Hz to 2 kHz in an anechoic chamber would sound pretty thin, boomy and all around terrible. But then, everyone knows this, right Richard? They would also know that one should not be designing in a FR roll-off above 2 kHz, as this means that they are seriously confused about the difference between flat on-axis direct sound and the power response of a loudspeaker in a room.

Richard stated:
" Step response shows the ability of a speaker to accurately reproduce a transient sound. It correlates with sound quality better than flipping a coin. "

This one is also wrong. Technically, one would use an impulse, not a step function, to check transient response. In fact, most people do not know how to properly interpret a band-limited step fucntion, INCLUDING a great many loudspeaker designer's!

As for your cute little comment:
" It correlates with sound quality better than flipping a coin. "
I doubt that you, or a great many folks, would know what to look for in a step function, how to interpret one, and whether or not one particular step function was 'better' than another. In that case, flipping a coin would be a more sensible thing to do.

You can portray my experience and knowledge as being condecending, but I am merely talking about reality, not some ideal dream world where _everyone_ has been educated and trained about acoustics and filter theory, and has had the sheer bench time looking at loudspeaker measurements and data just like someone who does it year after year for a living, 5 days a week.

Jon Risch

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