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Criticizing the critics...and the designers

"The measurements MUST be performed under standardized conditions otherwise they are meaningless. Because if you include the room in the measurements every room will generate a different result."

"Since rooms do interact with speakers the speaker designer has no choice but to use anechoic conditions for measuring during the design stage. Of course when placed in a fully furnished room the result will be different (and unpredictable) but it's at that point that placement of speakers,"

Not only is this proof that the reviews are almost worthless but that most audio designers today in general and loudspeaker designers in particular are tinkerers and not engineers. And not only are they merely tinkerers, but not very insightful ones at that. If cars were only designed to perform and be tested on a standard test track, there would be no reason to ever develop anti lock brakes or four wheel drive. On a test track, these are of no value, it's only when you get them into the real world that they prove their sometimes life saving value. NOBODY listens to loudspeakers in an anechoic chamber and NOBODY listens to recordings made under precise controlled laboratory conditions. Loudspeakers are NOT designed to compensate for the real rooms they will be installed in insofar as their acoustics are different from anechoic chambers and different from each other and sound systems are NOT designed anymore to compensate for differences in the way recordings are made. Amplifiers and speakers are only to a limited degree designed to compensate for how they will interact with each other. Therefore, equipment which tests nearly identically in standard anechoic or laboratory bench test conditions can and do perform entirely differently at home and by reading the test reports, the buyer has no way to predict what the differences will be or if they are acceptable. We know that an 8 watt amplifier will not drive an AR3 playing organ pedal notes to room shaking levels and that's about as far as it goes.

At the very least for loudspeakers, were the tests more complete and the science better developed, we would get some idea of the correlation. But it is far easier to just throw two or three drivers in a box with a handful of electonic parts to the interminably same paradymes and call it a breakthrough, than it is to drag that box first into a lab, measure everything about it, and then drag it into a lot of rooms, place them in different positions, and measure them each time all over again trying to gain insight into the differences, and harder yet to provide useful means the user can benefit from to optimize them and mitigate or entirely negate the differences. And that's what speaker manufacturers do. So poorly conceived, that for many manufacturers, even two units of the same model under the same conditions can sound different. And to think that people actually devour these reviews and then spend big money to play this Russian roulette hit or miss game. Small wonder the buyers in this market have dwindled to such a small niche who endlessly swap equipment at great expense while the kind of people who shopped and bought expensive sound systems a generation or two ago have lost any incentive to do the same today. I know I have, and after last weekend in Piscataway, now more than ever.

Interesting that official dogma now accepts digital equalizers for "room correction." It's one small concession to the reality of the limitations of the art. Among the cultists, the same mantras and shiboleths still hold...analog good, digital bad...no equaliziaton or tone controls good, equalization bad...vinyl records good, cds bad...tubes good, transistors bad...moving coil cartridges good, moving magnet cartridges bad...exotic wires good, Radio Shack/Home Depot wires bad....etc.

This will probably wind up in Whiner's Woad. Negativity is a point of view not favored here...especially if their is any truth in it.

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