Question about Stereophile reviews & measurements

[MidnightSensi]

I subscribe to Stereophile. I went away from it for a while, but, in the end it is the most well written and entertaining magazine I get. My favorite sections are the measurements, although I feel like I see a disconnect between the measurements and the reviews.

Take June 2010, for example. They reviewed a Canton Reference 3.2 DC, here are a few comments from the measurement section:

-"Fairly strong cabinet resonance on the sideswalls 12" from the bottom. It is possible that because of the radiating area of the affected region is small, this resonance will not color the sound."
-"There was also a strong vibrational mode at 703Hz on the top panel; again, because the affected area is small and because, in this instance, the frequency is above the critical region, this behavior will not color the sound."
-"In the time domain, the Canton's step response suggests that its tweeter and midrange unit are connected in inverted acoustic polarity, its woofers in positive polarity. However, the tail of each units step smoothly blends with the start of the step of the next lower in frequency which correlated with the superb frequency domain integration of their outputs. The spectral-decay plot is generally clean, if not quite in the league of the best speakers I have measured."

Then you look at the waterfall plot, and it looks pretty bad considering the price. The frequency response looks great, but the waterfall looks terrible.

Now you read the review and they make it sound like its a steal at 16,000/pair. I can't imagine the imaging being too great, considering the phase issues and decay.

The PSB Image B6 speakers they measure later, has a nicer looking waterfall, and while the frequency response isn't as great as the Canton, or really anything else for that matter, the measurement comments came off as a little ho-hum. Maybe I'm intepreting the graphs wrong, and I realize they gave the PSB a nice review...but the Canton review seemed a bit too 'glowing' for its measurements.

PSB got "a nice budget speaker" and Canton got "Check please, at 16,000/pair"

That said, I'm not an expert on interpreting these, and never heard the speakers, but, I still found it interesting.

 

[lsiberian]

I subscribe to Stereophile. I went away from it for a while, but, in the end it is the most well written and entertaining magazine I get. My favorite sections are the measurements, although I feel like I see a disconnect between the measurements and the reviews.

Take June 2010, for example. They reviewed a Canton Reference 3.2 DC, here are a few comments from the measurement section:

-"Fairly strong cabinet resonance on the sideswalls 12" from the bottom. It is possible that because of the radiating area of the affected region is small, this resonance will not color the sound."
-"There was also a strong vibrational mode at 703Hz on the top panel; again, because the affected area is small and because, in this instance, the frequency is above the critical region, this behavior will not color the sound."
-"In the time domain, the Canton's step response suggests that its tweeter and midrange unit are connected in inverted acoustic polarity, its woofers in positive polarity. However, the tail of each units step smoothly blends with the start of the step of the next lower in frequency which correlated with the superb frequency domain integration of their outputs. The spectral-decay plot is generally clean, if not quite in the league of the best speakers I have measured."

Then you look at the waterfall plot, and it looks pretty bad considering the price. The frequency response looks great, but the waterfall looks terrible.

Now you read the review and they make it sound like its a steal at 16,000/pair. I can't imagine the imaging being too great, considering the phase issues and decay.

The PSB Image B6 speakers they measure later, has a nicer looking waterfall, and while the frequency response isn't as great as the Canton, or really anything else for that matter, the measurement comments came off as a little ho-hum. Maybe I'm intepreting the graphs wrong, and I realize they gave the PSB a nice review...but the Canton review seemed a bit too 'glowing' for its measurements.

PSB got "a nice budget speaker" and Canton got "Check please, at 16,000/pair"

That said, I'm not an expert on interpreting these, and never heard the speakers, but, I still found it interesting.

You can't bash stuff in a magazine. So you must read between the lines.

A waterfall is helpful above 500hz below that it's less helpful. It should be at -40db and measured far enough away to not get stuff that won't really make it to the listening position.

 

[ratso]

i have a love/hate relationship with stereo magazines. i read a bunch of the online ones and even subscribe to TAS and stereophile. i love reading about the new equipment and i do believe that the reviews have some validity, as the reviewers get to hear and compare a lot of equipment. but i must admit that when i read a review that says "what REALLY made X sound great was changing the power cord/speaker wire/power conditioner/break in time" they kinda lose me.

 

[jliedeka]

You really can't take the reviews as anything more than a data point. The tests are all done sighted and studies have proved that bias is unavoidable in sighted listening tests.

For speakers, I read the first part of the review that describes the speakers then skip to the measurements. Mainly I look at the the impedance/phase graph and the frequency response graphs. Those can give you a pretty good idea of how good the speaker is. Too bad they don't do distortion testing.

Generally you have to get used to John Atkinson's style. He usually tries to be as kind as possible to high price speakers. Also, he tends to measure a lot of stuff that doesn't matter. Most of the guys at Stereophile are tweako cultists so they obsess over jitter which is a tiny component of THD+N and rarely audible.

I'd rather see power cube graphs for the amplifiers they measure than the useless IMD graphs.

Jim