>But others say there are things in high end audio that will never me measurable and that measurements are really not that important.
Speaker preference has a very strong correlation (if you weren't a scientist you'd say it was causal) with with uniformity of amplitude response curves at angles representative of a direct listening window and where front-wall, side-wall, and floor/ceiling reflections come from in average rooms.
Sean Olive has reportedly taken that to the next level producing a formula that predicts peoples' speaker ratings based on such measurements.
Stored energy is important too, although that shows up in polar response curves (ripples in the on-axis response can come from diffraction effects that aren't that audible, but ripples at many angles tend to be resonances which are) with fine enough frequency resolution.
>How important do you think measurements are?
Very. Good enough to predict that you're not going to like a speaker before you go to the trouble of listening.
>Are the ears really the only true arbiter?
If you can hear it you can measure it and if you can measure it you can fix it or decide it's not worth the price tag which goes with the fix.
You'd do well to read _Sound Reproduction: Loudspeakers and Rooms_ by Floyd Toole.
Speaker preference has a very strong correlation (if you weren't a scientist you'd say it was causal) with with uniformity of amplitude response curves at angles representative of a direct listening window and where front-wall, side-wall, and floor/ceiling reflections come from in average rooms.
Sean Olive has reportedly taken that to the next level producing a formula that predicts peoples' speaker ratings based on such measurements.
Stored energy is important too, although that shows up in polar response curves (ripples in the on-axis response can come from diffraction effects that aren't that audible, but ripples at many angles tend to be resonances which are) with fine enough frequency resolution.
>How important do you think measurements are?
Very. Good enough to predict that you're not going to like a speaker before you go to the trouble of listening.
>Are the ears really the only true arbiter?
If you can hear it you can measure it and if you can measure it you can fix it or decide it's not worth the price tag which goes with the fix.
You'd do well to read _Sound Reproduction: Loudspeakers and Rooms_ by Floyd Toole.