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Should a reference speaker be neutral, or just great sounding?

I was thinking about something as I was typing about how I've observed a magazine behave, and it occurred to me that I have a personal bias not everyone may agree to.  Here's what I think:
"To call a speaker a reference product it should at the very least be objectively neutral."

However, as that magazine points out, many great speakers are idiosyncratic ideas about what music should sound like in the home, regardless of being tonally neutral.

Do you agree?  If a speaker is a "reference" product, do you expect it to be neutral, or do you think it has to perform exceptionally well, but not necessarily this way?
erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by kennyc

kennyc
1,166 posts
 
my broken speaker sounds pretty neutral
kennyc
1,166 posts
 
“Should a reference speaker be neutral..”

At first glance, I get what the OP was asking. But upon deeper scrutiny, the exercise seems a bit ludicrous. And at some level, it’s like finding a solution to a problem when a problem doesn’t exist.

- The OP is asking for “objective” factors from “subjective” judgements- this doesn’t exist. While some would say linear 20-20khz is a criteria, a tube guy may not care about linearity at all. Does that mean tube guys has no point of references? Of course not. Speakers are imperfect facsimiles of reality.
When evaluating speakers, people have different subjective importance/ranking of bass slam, midrange, transparency, clarity, musicality, detail, extension, etc. Trying to establish a one size fits all....

- Reference can be defined as any point in which other points compare. So technically any comparisons can be said to have a reference. We couldn’t survive without comparison of choices.

- Reference Speaker as defined by an audio reviewer as being the subjectively best speaker he has heard to date. This too has its limitations. Audio reviewers can demo only a small sample of what is available. As such, their “reference speaker” is limited to this small sample. Ever notice that reviewer reference speakers are rarely the same amongst reviewers? If I were to demo $5k speakers to come up with a favorite aka reference, while another demos $100k speakers to come up with his reference, Seems obvious that these two references aren’t really the same.

- For personal audio, what value is having a reference speaker (as defined as an audio reviewer) in the first place? Unless you’re trying to communicate to others like audio reviewers, isn’t our personal speakers simply evaluated by personal preferences? Don’t we subjectively simply say speaker A has this these positive/negative traits, and speaker B has these positive/negative traits...? Seems unlikely that we’d elevate a single pair of speakers to which all others will be compare to.

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