This is an interesting thread, but IMO the mark has been badly missed. The issue of what makes a “good” speaker is vexingly difficult subject, as there are many different axes that this could be measured on, and perhaps axes that exist but simply cannot be represented as data.
Going back to the earlier part of the thread where someone suggested that using the popularity of a speaker was an example of the argumentum ad populum fallacy: this is an incorrect application of the this idea. That fallacy applies when there is an objective fact about the world that is contentious, and an argument is made that the most popular belief is true. It requires a subject that can fit into the categories of true/false, accurate/innacurate etc...
If a person was trying to ascertain which speaker has the most accurate frequency response, trying to answer this based on popularity would be an example of the argumentum ad populum fallacy.
But I will venture a guess that that this thesis has never been proposed in seriousness.
When it comes to personal preferences or subjective experiences it is not possible to validate some and invalidate others. A total idiot who knows nothing about audio can be just as happy with their crap speakers as the genius with their hyper designed monstrosity.
Resarch about personal preferences, which are subjective, does count as evidence. I think Bose has based their designs on such evidence, and succeeded with this approach. (Personally I think they hit some sweet spots along the way, but once they got into the “spacialized dsp” home theater stuff, and then the portable speaker market, I start to hate the sound. But apparently I and most audio enthusiasts are in the minority here.)
When it comes to subjective preferences, there can be study of the objective elements of the speaker that are the cause of the subjective preference. But if the goal was to “evidence based design,” it seems like evidence from psychoacoustic research would be the proper grounding, with the physics in service to that.
The concept of “scientific” investigation of audio as Amir is doing is interesting, but for practical reasons very limited. The core criteria of this approach, as applied to DAC, amps, streamers is looking most narrowly whether a device is at a minimum copying and transmitting data correctly, and then looking how closely an electrical signal is to its original when passed through gear, after scaling for gain.
In this sense, one can say the gear is “accurate.” But this is not only a limited perspective on the question of whether a speaker is accurate, but reflects that the notion of accuracy, of “hi fi” itself is virtually meaningless outside of a narrow set of parameters, important only to the ever dwindling audience for acoustically generates music.
This standard would be, does a chain of transducer-electricity-a whole bunch of other complicated stuff- electricity- transducer give a listener a close approximation of the original sound.
There are so many reasons why this view of audio is outdated at best, but I will try to point out some glaring examples:
- even if we are considered simply mic’d acoustic music played back on a high quality system, the system could only hope to come close to replicating the sound, of reprocducing it with high fidelity, if the actual sound level was in the ballpark of the original acoustic source. This will almost never be the case, and it is only under the control of the listener. My guess is that the vast majority of real world listening is done at a much lower level than the original event. (Maybe an acoustic guitar or other solo instruments would come the closest.). Most people would find the experience of sitting 10 feet in front of a drum set with a drummer playing hard to be on the upper level of comfort.
Even people who love to blast rock music will do so at much lower relative levels than the actual instruments.
Because of this, people who make recordings of music (which I do) are not concerned with “accuracy” but more with communicating the “expression” of the music. So if you are trying to represent the expression of let’s say a big band orchestra, techniques are required to represent this sound energy without literally recreating the sound energy. This is basically the illusion of “verisimilitude,”
(This lowely “loudness control” of the old days was an attempt to mitigate this.)
Beyond this, as we move from the dawn of the recording industry to now, speaker systems are more properly considered sound “producers” than “reproducers.” Many sound sources are not even electric, never mind acoustic, but actually originate as data and become sound for the first time at the playback speaker
This leads to strange feedback loops, but one of the biggest that had played a role since the beginning of the music business is that people who make recordings have to target the expected listening environment of the audience. This means the technologies and trends of speakers designs themselves become active considerations for record producing choices.
Simply put, if the one is trying to make a hit pop record these days, you have to take into account that primary listening environments will be cars, Bluetooth speakers, various earbuds and headphones, computer speaker systems, home theater systems. The way these systems are voiced, which is all over the damn place, cannot be left out of the production process.
What this means is that for the vast majority of records, the only reference point that accuracy has any meaning would be how close the playback represents the experience of the music makers in the production environment. This is largely dominated by nearfield monitors, with an increasing reliance on subwoofers.
This makes for a moving target. A commercial speaket designer has not only to figure out these vexingly issues of voicing and accuracy, but also countless other aspects that affect the marketability of the product. This is a freakishly tall order, and I agree with the sentiment that some amazing engineering is happening among the larger commercial speaker companies to address it.
FWIW, I purchased a pair of the Neumann KH120s to use as studio montitors, and found them to be a profoundly horrible sounding speaker. Like many modern studio monitors, they presented a sound that at best, at best, I could say was accurate enough that I could use them. Even in that realm, they seemed to fall short in that they tended to, paradoxically, impart a characteristic sound that was superficially flattering to a mix (not what I look for.) They seemed voiced way too bright, and had an “ artificial” quality to them, whatever that vague subjective description might mean. They also have a steady hiss, which was annoying when sitting close.
I sold them relatively quickly as I don’t like to work on speakers that “sound bad.”
I can’t pretend to expertise here, but while I certainly think measuremt and science should be used in speaket design, “accuracy” considered too narrowly can lead speaker designers badly astray.
