Well respected has nothing to do with it. There's a lot of well respected crap.
"Well respected" implies consensus. So, it's "crap" because YOU don't agree with that consensus. Who died and appointed you the Arbiter That Trumps All?
And we're using 1970s speakers that measure like crap...why???
The comparison is valid for demonstrating my point, that studio monitors and home loudspeakers are designed for different jobs, and that manufacturers have long acknowledged that. I chose that particular comparison also because it involved a rare instance in the history of audio where one basic design is created for both markets, but with consciously divergent performance characteristics (beyond the merely cosmetic) to account for differences in applications and performance expectations by their intended users.
And BTW, what is the cutoff date? How old do speakers have to be before you feel it is safe to dismiss them as "crap," engineered by fools, mere philistines and idiots compared to modern-day, more enlightened THOU?
There has certainly been a fair amount of water under many bridges since then in terms of technical advances, etc. But old speakers, engineered in a time when the primary research tools were trial and error and aesthetic judgement - when loudspeaker design was as much a black art as a science - were NOT all crap! One could say that given their lack of so much technology we now take for granted, that they made speakers that sound as good as they did was a remarkable achievement.
So, what do today's wizards - with all their technological wherewithal - use as an excuse for why so many MODERN speakers still sound like crap? I am NOT talking about speaker makers who build crappy speakers on purpose - for a specific, likely uneducated market. I am talking about technically competent designers who, despite wonderful tools and good intentions, still manage to make speakers that sound worse - sometimes MUCH worse - than Winslow Burhoe was able to make with little more than his ears, a pad of paper and pencil, and a slide rule?
That is how a reproduction tool operates, yes. If it is accurate, it will measure accurately, and vice versa.
NO! NOT vice versa! You are assuming the measurements are complete, perfect and actually account for EVERYTHING. They aren't, and they CAN'T.
Only if you don't have inadequate measurement capability and/or don't understand measurements. They're in fact very good predictors.
NO, they are NOT! That you think so only betrays experimenter bias on YOUR part.
Except... that isn't true.
Again, you assume the perfection of the measurements!
Nor is this, presuming biases such as aesthetics are removed..
Wrong AGAIN! As a musician, I am qualified to have an informed opinion about whether or not a given speaker's reproduction of say, a string quartet, actually sounds like a string quartet. And I don't require the charts and graphs to make that judgement. And if the speakers' reproduction doesn't pass muster, but the measurements say that these speakers are the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel, that disqualifies the measurements on their face. That there is a difference that can be heard tells me that the measurements aren't measuring EVERYTHING, they are only measuring what they are designed to measure!
So, here we meet a total impasse. YOU have just said that measurements of loudspeaker performance are perfect and complete. In other words, there is no longer anything about loudspeaker performance that isn't completely understood and completely measurable. Ridiculous on its face!
* you WILL find the issue; assuming you're thorough.
And around and around we go. I can be as thorough and conscientious as the day is long, but my measurements are limited by what they are designed to measure. They can measure ONLY that.
Then you either weren't thorough, or you take offense to accurate sound reproduction (which can be valid in the case of a poor recording).
So, now you just insult me?
Inadequate measurements done thoroughly and with meticulous attention to detail are STILL inadequate. As for me "taking offense" at accurate sound reproduction, I remind you of my previous string quartet example. If the speakers in question really ARE accurate reproducers, they should indeed sound like a string quartet - enough so for suspension of disbelief. If they do NOT sound credible in direct comparison to the real thing, there is nothing to "take offense" at, unless I just don't like string quartets. I merely notice the comparison, and that the copy doesn't match the original. That is an objective judgement, not an aesthetic one.
This does assume a few things, I admit. It assumes that the recording itself, as well as the other equipment in the reproduction chain are not seriously flawed, in which case my complaint lies not with the speakers but elsewhere.
We don't qualify "the sound" in isolation - we can however qualify its correlation to the measurements. We can measure far beyond the thresholds of audibility; the vice versa is untrue.
And again, you are missing it! I concede to you that measurements of fine gradations in say, frequency response indeed do detect fractional dB deviations from ideal with much finer resolution than can our ears. But in the end - STILL! ALL you've measured in that case is frequency response, albeit VERY accurately. My point is that among ALL the parameters that conceivably
might have influence over our perceptions of reproduced sound, that conceivably
might influence our judgement about the accuracy of a speaker's reproduction, our super-accurate measurements you hold so sacred are - at the current state of the art - measuring only a subset, not the whole picture.
Like with everything else, the technologies of measurement are continuing to improve. The theoretical sciences behind audio reproduction are refined continuously and with them, new measurements are devised to take these theoretical advances into account. What's more, the new knowledge and insights - as with every field of inquiry - come from unexpected places. You are saying there is nothing left to know about loudspeaker theory and design, that it is all completely understood. So we should then, I guess, stop this wasteful expenditure of human effort and capital on research! We already know all the answers. I say that's ridiculous!
Clearly, we disagree so fundamentally that communication in any meaningful sense is only slightly more likely than persuasion. So this is it for me.
