I don't disagree with you about industry standards. My crusade has always been against the validity of the preference score as a way to determine listener preference.
The speaker the R3 lost the blind test to has good spins and overall, a neutral response. If you read the details of the blind test, the differences weren't in coloration of the response, but clarity, realism, and the harshness in the R3's.
I’m the one who performed that blind test, and I agree — I couldn’t find any obvious major coloration differences once bass was normalized. They sounded remarkably similar actually, in terms of frequency response. But they did not sound similar in terms of “fidelity”, for lack of a better word.
This objective and subjective review from Amir is really fascinating to me, because of how closely it aligns with my KEF R3 experience: I initially bought the R3 because the published specs seemed to indicate a speaker that should outperform just about anything else out there — and now thanks to Amir, we’ve confirmed that KEF was not sugarcoating the measurements. The KEF R3 really does measure fantastically well.
And yet in my blind test, they didn’t really dominate, despite their phenomenal measurements suggesting that they should. They were clearly fantastic speakers, but the truth is when compared side by side, they lost pretty severely to the Ascend Sierra 2EX in a bass-normalized blind test. And this result is mirrored in Amir’s subjective listening where the R3 loses subjectively to another speaker (the Revel), which purely according to measurements shouldn’t be happening. And there are many other accounts you will find online mirroring this.
As for what could explain this? I do not know. Many of us suspect dispersion breadth to be the likely culprit, but we need more data to better establish exactly how much more important wide dispersion may be than how current preference scores weight it. And thanks to Amir’s equipment and hard work, many of us are happy to look forward to much more valuable data
FWIW, ultimately I ended up returning the KEF R3’s, but I still have my Revel F206 and all my Ascend flagship speakers. I still have not done a blind test between the Revel F206 and Ascend RAAL Towers, but I do still plan to get around to it eventually.
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