I am the one responsible for any inconsistancies you note. Gene tries to get me to conform, but I am not much of a conformist frankly. Sorry to dissapoint you. The intent of my article was not consistency but rather fidelity to the standards and metrics presented in the new standard written in part by one of our industry greats, Don Keele, who was kind enough to share his program, something he had spent several years of his life in development with me for free. If you need consistency, better compare the authors first, and the publishers second.... Sorry I dissapointed you with the review.
There is a reason why Gene probably gets you to conform, and thats so that the people reading the reviews can do direct comparisons with other subs that are also reviewed and measured. If there is no standard playing field, then the reviews in many ways become pointless.
Which brings me to another point on measurements and how they are done specifically. Measuring at the point of driver compression(max RMS roughly) in itself can be pointless in many ways too, because.
A. Subs tend to distort and behave in a non linear fashion when driven to full "RMS" or slightly below/above
B. The amount of distortion at that same point will be different from sub to sub as each sub will soft clip differently depending on design and intended use.
C. Under normal use a sub is not(it shouldnt be anyway) going to always be playing full duty cycle for any length of time at the max rms test point. Typical use a sub will/should only be playing a few watts rms with quick instant dynamics that hit at or near RMS at MOST if set up correctly and sized properly for a given room and volume tastes per user.
I think giving Max SPL measurements are fine and dandy to gauge max DYNAMIC output, but a properly sized sub(or subs) for your setup requirements should never even approach hitting the units max rms in a continous fashion when all is said and done. And measurements like order harmonic distortion,group delay,linear response etc should be done well below max rms(-3 to -6db at the very least from where the driver starts to compress resulting in response that becomes non linear).
Just my 2 cents.
