A few notes on the above....
- My credibility is based on 15 years doing this for a living and working with a tremendous amount of equipment not just over periods of years, but every day and in just about every type of environment, budget, source material, etc.
I thought so until I read the paragraph I quoted. As I said, you could well be right about everything else, I mean prior. It is that one little part where you lost credibility, not all but some anyway; and that's just my opinion that you don't have to care about.
I stand by my description of what I felt about the KEF R700 as well as my relaying of what other people's opinions have been of it since we set that rig up.
I don't blame you. If you don't like what you heard, nothing else matter. I respect the other people's opinion too. It is afterall their "opinions" as you clearly stated this time.
12 people have now come in to listen to these speakers and not one has listed the R700 as anything but last - and by a large gap in performance. More than half of our listeners didn't even want to go back to them after hearing any of the others. I don't have anything against KEF. Heck, I'm a dealer of the line! But, in the market space they are priced in, I don't feel like the R700 is perhaps the best speaker out there.
Again, that's their opinions, but if (only if) those 12 people represent all who have listened to those speakers so far and all came to such extreme conclusions, i.e. large gap..., didn't even want to ... etc., then I would find it really odd. I have not heard the R700 but they do have go reviews, nice looking graphs too. Also, the R900 sounds great to me, so by extension I would think the R700 should sound pretty good too. Now it is entirely possible that those other speakers you set up are much superior than the R700.
I also disagree with the robotic idea that people should trust in measurements rather than their own ears. I feel that people should absolutely trust their senses as to what sounds good to them. Music is to be enjoyed by the senses. That's how it works! To go by measurements to determine what sounds good begs the question: Why listen at all? This is not to disparage measurements. Not in the least! But, IMO, that is well behind actual perceived performance from the speaker itself in determining sound quality.
I fully agree with you on this, but it does not mean speakers that do not sound good to us automatically sound bad to others. That is my whole point about going by sense would end up with subjective opinions. That is fine as long as we do not confuse it as facts and tell others that speakers that don't sound as good to us are bad. As an extreme example just to make my point clear, one may not even like the most accurate speakers in the world but that does not mean those speakers won't be loved by others. Some conductors of Philharmonic orchestras may like them. I believe specs and test data are a good place to start, but should always end with listening with our ears.
Lastly, I would just like to point out that the other speakers were designed by engineers as well.
I did not say or imply they were not. It is also sort of irrelevant to our discussion here. Engineers routinely have to design things to meet specific goals, so it depends a lot on the goals set by or for them. It could be a variety of things, most likely include a budget, frequency response, impedance (magnitude and phase) characteristics and many other things. I simply made the point about the importance of facts and figures in order to be objective; and could have substituted the word engineer with "designer", or whatever.
