Changes everything? Can you clarify what you mean?
Here you go from the Stereophile review: "This track also revealed some slight problems with midrange clarity....such as the clarinet on my Mosaic CD (Stereophile STPH015-2),the instrument occasionally sounded a little more sour in intonation than I was anticipating."
The Soundstage measurements aren't very precise or informative, they are nice but certainly would not be the kind engineers take on the test bench to measure performance.
Besides being very tiny FR plots and not very suitable for scientific analysis, there's plenty of things going on in an FR plot that make it difficult to say its caused by one thing or the other. As far as resonances, sometimes they can be seen on the impedence plot if it's a metal woofer issue, sometimes it's a cabinet issue.
The Soundstage measurements aren't that informative. Here's a better one, and it shows very high THD at 100 dB, so the woofer certainly do not perform very well at high volumes. I know from personal experience as I've owned the Usher BE-718s (and Paradigm S2v2s as well, which were congested in the upper midrange in my experience).
Let's see now. The distortion graph you show is for a level of 100 dB at 1 foot for the Usher Be-718. Care to figure out what that would be at 2 meters, which is the distance the Soundstage graph is for? Care to tell us why the distortion at 30 Hz would be of much interest? The Be-718 is about 15 dB down at 30 Hz.
If you really want to listen to music at levels above 90 dB, I suggest that small monitor speakers are not the most suitable for that. I would also advise you to use hearing protection, but since that would degrade the sound, a better solution would be to listen at more moderate levels.
<!--[if gte mso 9]><![endif]--> Well, let’s look at some of what you said.
“According to Stereophile review of the S2s, they also heard some congestion, which they partially attributed to the grill, which is recommended to be attached during playback however it happens to rattle during playback. The same Stereophile review noted a large high-Q resonance mode at 800Hz.”
The review in Stereophile does not use the word congestion, and the above does not accurately reflect what it does say. You just say the grille rattles during playback, which is misleading on a couple of counts. It doesn’t constitute congestion. Also, the rattling occurred with a test signal, not normal playback of music. What John Atkinson said was “. . . what I did hear from both speakers when I played the half-step–spaced toneburst track on Editor's Choice was some rattling of the grille between 90Hz and 160Hz.” It wasn’t normal music but a test signal!
<!--[if gte mso 9]><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <![endif]--> Now, I did try to explain to you that that 800 Hz resonance for the S2 would show up in the response measurements, but you didn’t take the hint. Look at the graphs in Chart 1 of the Soundstage measurements. In the top graph, showing the curves on axis and 15 and 30 degrees off axis, there is that narrow dip at about 800 Hz in all of them. Now go down to the graph showing the curves at 45, 60, and 75 degrees off axis: there is a dip there on all of them. So you see, that resonance around 800 Hz does show up in the Soundstage FR and dispersion graphs.
SoundStage! Measurements - Paradigm Reference Signature S2 Loudspeakers (6/2004)
That little dip shows in the on axis response curve in Stereophile but because of the way Stereophile displays the off axis curves, they do not directly show in the resonance, although you could infer the resonance . I’m not complaining since the way Stereophile displays the dispersion has some advantages.
As to the significance of the resonance, it is not merely that it shows in measurements but how much it affects the sound. JA seems to have thought he could hear it on test signals and maybe on some music, including one of the Stereophile recordings he helped make.
“As the toneburst went through the upper notes in the 512–1024Hz octave, each toneburst could be heard to acquire a very slight "shadow" at a different pitch. The same thing happened an octave lower, but with the shadow at the higher-pitched tone. I wasn't sure if I could consistently hear anything like this effect when listening to music; with spectrally pure sounds, however, such as the clarinet on my Mosaic CD (Stereophile STPH015-2), the instrument occasionally sounded a little more sour in intonation than I was anticipating.”
Paradigm Reference Signature S2 loudspeaker | Stereophile.com
<!--[if gte mso 9]><![endif]-->So it is a very minor problem and it did not prevent Stereophile from classing it as a Class A, Limited LF speaker.<!--[if gte mso 9]><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <![endif]--> My own favorite recordings of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet sound beautiful over my Signature S2 speakers. And, it is likely that they would sound beautiful over most of the speakers mentioned in this thread.
