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RE: Twas ever thus….

….or it goes back at least 25 years as you observe. Back in the March 1994 issue of Stereophile, J. Gordon Holt wrote an article titled: Space, the Final Frontier. In it he observed that speakers with a tilt towards the bass (for "warmth") plus a treble peak (for "detail") were tending to get rave reviews compared to similar speakers tending to more of a flat type of response which were tending to get luke warm reviews. A Weslake monitor speaker, which got a luke warm review, was cited as an example and compared with some speakers which had the colorations JGH described. Now I might like the speakers with the bass tilt/treble peak more than the Weslakes, but I would not call them more accurate than the Weslakes in view of John Atkinson's frequency response graphs of all the speakers JGH compared in the article. It would be nice if the term "accurate" had become more accurately used following the Space… article, but luckily nobody was holding their breath back in '94.

I have to reluctantly admit that I generally agree with John Atkinson's take on the original post that a good engineer can listen around certain tendencies of the monitors if they are understood by the engineer. However the Mercury Living Presence recordings have been highly regarded for decades, but they were mastered over Altec V.O.T. horns, which should seemingly horrify JGH and JA from comments they have made.

Paul


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