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Re: NOBODY listens to loudspeakers in an anechoic chamber

If automotive designers tested their efforts on a test track conceptually as restricted and unrepresentative of real world driving conditions as an anechoic chamber is for testing loudspeakers, they would be constrained to a dry level straightaway. A good test track simulates every road condition and hazard a driver is likely to face and some which are rare but do happen.

Engineers (as opposed to tinkerers) don't guess, they know fairly well in advance what the performance of their mental product is likely to be when it is built and used and they have to anticipate every variable it is likely to encounter and make provisions for them in their designs. That's a good definition of what engineering is. And while financial and ad experts may judge the success or failure of a product by how the market likes it, how many units were sold, or how much profit it makes, other engineers judge it by how well it performs its intended function. By this standard, loudspeakers get a poor or at best a fair rating. If designers don't, won't, or can't get the job done, it's partly out of ignorance, partly out of laziness, partly out of lack of time and money, and partly because of the primitive state of the art as it exists today (not as ad hype would have us believe.)

Even in an anechoic chamber, the necessity for measuring polar response to characterize the complete energy output is often overlooked. How can you possibly know, calculate, guess how a speaker will work in a real room, if you don't know the nature of the energy projected at different parts of it. Can engineers take their speakers into typical listening rooms, place them in different positions, and find out what happens? Within finite limits, yes. Do they? Where have you seen any data from any of them or provisions in any of them to adjust for those differences?

What SHOULD the plan for designing loudspeakers be in specific terms?
Define the end result required
Define the likely working environment
Provde means to compensate for differences from one environment to another
Test the efficacy of meeting the stated objectives in different environments.

What DO they do?
Throw a few speakers, some electronic components, and some stuffing in a wooden box and when one comes out that you think will sell, market the hell out of it.

Maybe other people are only too happy to spend their hard earned cash on the products of such poorly conceived efforts but I won't. I can easily build an infinite variety equally bad speakers as any of them myself for a lot less money.

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