Рет қаралды 7,374
PLEASE READ THIS! IT'S DEEP!
Don't misunderstand what I'm saying - measurements ARE important, but it's my opinion that they are of limited value when used to judge how a speaker sounds. They can tell you what the speaker is doing under ideal conditions, but they don't include the other major components of the listening experience: the room and the person listening.
Speakers are a complex system and you can't arrive at easy, simple answers when you try to objectively assess the performance of a pair. There are some widely accepted "rule of thumb" guidelines that can give you insights as to how they may sound, but there are no written in stone rules.
Flat response and good off-axis response are two of those objective guidelines, but you have to remember that musical enjoyment is a purely subjective experience. What one person loves another may not care for, where sound "quality" is concerned. There's the expression that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and that certainly applies for audio when you swap "eye" for "ear".
Whatever music you are listening to sounds the way it does to you due to three major factors:
- the speakers
- the room the speakers are playing in
- your ear / brain combo, where the brain interprets what the ears are receiving.
"Interpret" is a word that allows a lot of variability. Your hearing system isn't perfect - far from it - and it is subject to a long list of factors that can influence it.
All three factors are interdependent and together they determine what the listening experience will be. If you move the speakers to another room, they will sound different. If you are stressed and unable to relax, they will sound different. Not different in reality, but in your perception of how they sound through your ear / brain interface.
On top of this there is the fact that there isn't an exact representation of how a piece of music is supposed to sound. Music isn't like an engineering sample kept at a constant temperature in a sealed vault and taken out when needed to compare with another sample for accuracy. It was recorded and produced and nowhere in that chain did anyone actually hear the finished work until it was played back on a system in a room and into ears that is different from yours. The best you can do is get close to how it's supposed to sound, because there's no exact reference to ensure exact reproduction. So that throws the concept of accuracy out the window, since there isn't a precise point of comparison.
In other words, music, and this is probably the reason why we can listen to the same piece over and over, is a singular experience every time you play it. Like a snowflake, no two listening sessions are exactly the same. And none will be exactly what the music is, because what the music "is" doesn't really exist.
Where measurements are needed is during the design process. The speaker designer can use them to determine whether there are fixable problems. For example if he listens and hears something isn't quite right, he can use measurements to pinpoint where the problem may be.
On the other hand it's entirely possible to design speakers without measurements. Will they be "accurate"? Probably not, but as I said above, accuracy isn't a possibility anyway, since there isn't a precise reference.
Think of it this way: While the musicians were playing were they measuring how accurate their performance was? Did the engineer measure how accurate his mix is while producing the music?
So if objective measurement isn't of much use, are subjective reviews better? Well, it depends on what the reviewer likes to listen to - it's called subjective for a reason. It also depends on the other factors listed above, so there really isn't any way to know for certain based on either objective or subjective review whether you will like a pair of speakers. The reviewer isn't listening to them in YOUR room or with YOUR ears and he isn't YOU.
But chances are you WILL like them, if they were competently designed and you aren't going in looking for problems to "discover". And as I said in the video, even if you don't love them to begin with, you will get used to how they sound and possibly grow to love them.
Although I didn't mention it in the video, another example of this is creating "upgrade" kits for retail speakers, where the speaker is measured and the upgrade makes the response flatter. Does it sound better? Why was the speaker designed that way to begin with? Could it be that the designer WANTED it to sound like that? I know I'd be pissed if someone undid the work I did to justify selling overpriced crossover parts.