I appreciate your position, roberjerman. But speaking from long experience and from many conversations with other designers, there are no simple measurements that represent how a speaker sounds.
Much of this problem is from the microphone not hearing as we do.
If a designer hears something wrong, then only many indirect measurements can be made, with many specific listening sessions, to zoom in on what might be wrong.
If a designer uses physics to predict something might be wrong, he must imagine how that problem should sound on music and then how it will measure, how it can be measured, using what input signal, etc. But most designers do not rely on physics, which is why so many different designs are on the market.
Elizabeth, I've enjoyed some of your posts, thanks. What you write is true enough given how different most speakers sound. My experience and many others has been that, when a speaker's design gets better in the time-domain, not just the frequency domain, all listeners' opinions begin to converge, agreeing the sound is 'correct' on more and more instruments and voices.
This would be a speaker design becoming more and more time-coherent, more free of cabinet reflections and diffractions, of internal resonances, cone-breakups, and has a simpler crossover with fewer crappy parts. Those are not revealed in the usual Stereophile measurements.
And you are right- one must listen to what is most important to you. However, sort of to your point of some unified basis, I've always recommended we listen first to the voice range and work outwards from there. This makes sense when we agree we all know how voices are supposed to sound, that voices can be our reference 'base'.
Best regards,
Roy
Green Mountain Audio
If a designer hears something wrong, then only many indirect measurements can be made, with many specific listening sessions, to zoom in on what might be wrong.
If a designer uses physics to predict something might be wrong, he must imagine how that problem should sound on music and then how it will measure, how it can be measured, using what input signal, etc. But most designers do not rely on physics, which is why so many different designs are on the market.
Elizabeth, I've enjoyed some of your posts, thanks. What you write is true enough given how different most speakers sound. My experience and many others has been that, when a speaker's design gets better in the time-domain, not just the frequency domain, all listeners' opinions begin to converge, agreeing the sound is 'correct' on more and more instruments and voices.
This would be a speaker design becoming more and more time-coherent, more free of cabinet reflections and diffractions, of internal resonances, cone-breakups, and has a simpler crossover with fewer crappy parts. Those are not revealed in the usual Stereophile measurements.
And you are right- one must listen to what is most important to you. However, sort of to your point of some unified basis, I've always recommended we listen first to the voice range and work outwards from there. This makes sense when we agree we all know how voices are supposed to sound, that voices can be our reference 'base'.
Best regards,
Roy
Green Mountain Audio