Tough life isn't it?
Yes we agree, but I would call it a bad speaker at below the $100 mark.
This thread really highlights what has really gone wrong with the audio industry starting in the mid sixties. I guess not just the audio industry either.
The point is that an ethical speaker company with pretensions to to being in the high end realm has absolutely no justification for marketing a speaker like that at any price. It is a pure waste of natural resources. I certainly won't be steering any recommendations in their direction.
I'm guessing from your remarks that you haven't actually bothered to read the review or look at the measurements.
I'll quote from John Atkinson's 1999 article in Stereophile on the topic of measuring loudspeakers, which can be found on their website"
"Overall conclusions
While each measurement of a specific area of loudspeaker performance gives important information regarding possible sound behavior, it emerges that there is no direct mapping between any specific area of measured performance and any specific subjective attribute. As a result:
• Any sound quality attribute always depends on more than one measurement.
• No one measurement tells the whole story about a speaker's sound quality.
• Measuring the performance of a loudspeaker involves subjective choices.
• All measurements tell lies.
• Most important, while measurements can tell you how a loudspeaker sounds, they can't tell you how good it is. If you carefully look at a complete set of measurements, you can actually work out a reasonably accurate prediction of how a loudspeaker will sound. However, the measured performance will not tell you if it's a good speaker or a great speaker, or if it's a good speaker or a rather boring-sounding speaker. To assess quality, the educated ear is still the only reliable judge.
And no matter how good any one measurement, if the beginning of the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, where the composer introduces the trombones for the first time, or Jimi Hendrix's hammered-on tremolo at the start of "Voodoo Chile" on Electric Ladyland, doesn't send shivers down your spine, the loudspeaker is still doing something, somewhere, wrong."
All in all, an interesting read that points out the complexities involved in measuring loudspeakers, and how that correlates to how people listen. When you start to read many reviews you come to find that some times what people experience and the measurements say are not the same thing. Beyond the psychology of listening, this might be because the ear/brain is measuring a different thing than the mike.
Going back to the Beethoven Concert Grand for a moment and taking a look at the in-room response, there is no +-7 db variation in response. The graph makes that clear. Further, that's in-room response and not anechoic. To quote John in a review of the Legacy Audio Whisper:
"It is important to note that a flat response is not the goal in in-room responses such as these. The spectral analysis is not only affected by the loudspeaker's on-axis frequency response, but also by its power response and how that interacts with the room's reverberant field"
In short, the in-room response that he measures is not the complete picture of what is really going on. That is a far more complex topic, and it is part of the reason why measurements are pretty worthless to most people. The true picture is quite complicated, what the mike "hears" is dependent on where it is put which might not actually reflect what the listener hears. Where the mike is placed and how measurements are taken reflect a subjective choice. In the case of the Beethoven, he states that "Sitting low might produce a better tonal balance than sitting on the 40"-high tweeter axis." The average listening height according to one study quoted in Stereophile is 34" So, if you take a speaker designed to sum at that listening height and then measure is at the tweeter, are you really measuring what the listener is hearing? The answer is no.
The Beethovens as measured by John have top, side wall resonance of 600hz. Michael Fremer makes no comment regarding "boxy colorations" at any point in his review. In fact, he mentions that "the refined yet detailed-sounding Beethoven completely aced this test of midbass clarity and freedom from midbass coloration." This was with Johnny Hartman, and surely he would have have noticed a coloration with either Johnny or the piano recording that he listened to where he found "Recordings of solo piano demonstrated that the Beethoven was capable of handling that most difficult instrument without muting or softening it" and "The Beethovens produced an impressively large acoustic—not in the same league as the Wilson Audio Specialties MAXX2s, but big enough to suggest a large space—and reproduced the piano's transients and the hall's reflective character with sufficient speed and detail to make this a compelling listening experience." Hmm. No coloration to be found. I also have a two friends who play piano professionally and own Beethoven. Neither has commented on a "boxy coloration." Might be the typical 80-110 hz mode found in most rooms speaking if you are hearing a coloration in two different rooms.
Michael does make one comment regarding playback level restrictions of the speaker "I didn't expect the Beethoven to be able to express the Wilson's dynamic range, and it wasn't, but neither was it noticeably limited macrodynamically—at least until I cranked it up to high SPLs. That's when I discovered the speaker's most serious limitation: It didn't like to be pushed hard or played extremely loud. When it was, its pleasingly smooth tonal demeanor turned a bit hard and occasionally downright nasty, and dynamic compression set in. The good news is that I'm talking about playback levels that will approach the excessive in rooms of small to medium size—SPLs you'll hear at a live rock concert but are unlikely to experience in a concert hall or jazz club. In other words, the Beethoven Concert Grand shouldn't be cranked way up in a big room." This in comparison to a loudspeaker 10 times the prices.
"When I turned the volume down to less than ear-splitting levels for the Tommy lacquers, I found the Beethoven more than capable of rocking, with very good bass extension and weight on the nimble-fingered John Entwistle's bass parts and a nice thwack to Keith Moon's tom-toms and kick drum."
Perhaps now might be a good time to revisit that conversation about measurements, their value and whether or not some people bother to read them or know how to interpret them.
Best,
Patrick
(the long-winded poster)
