Have you ever seen what happens to the response of a dipole when you lift it a few feet off the ground? That's like drilling a hole in the side of a sealed subwoofer. Seriously. The measurement has nothing to do with how they will measure or sound in your living room. It's just wrong.
Here are two response measurements -- compare the bass. Curve 1:
View attachment 83799
Oh my god, way too much midbass, that speaker must sound boomy!
Curve 2:
View attachment 83800
Oh no, no bass at all, *that* speaker must sound really tinny!
Except that they're the same speaker. They're both the LRS. And both were carefully measured by reputable reviewers, John Atkinson in the first case and Amirm in the second.
In both cases, the measurements were invalid, pretty much in opposite ways. Neither has much to do with what you'll hear in your room, which is pretty flat down to 60 Hz.
Comparing the results and methodologies of the two reviews is I think a very informative exercise and again, a lesson in the limitations of measurements in reviews! Compare for example the measurements of vertical dispersion. Totally different scale -- but which *has more to do with what you hear in the room*? I'm guessing Stereophile's, unless you're a spider or a mouse.
Graphs and numbers can fool us into thinking that something is more reliable than it is. How can numbers lie? But if you look at the two graphs above, you'll see that they can, that these two measurements of the same speaker differ from one another more than methodologically consistent measurements of two entirely different speakers would.
I hope everyone who thinks you can "listen with measurements" sees this. That's a dangerous trap to fall into, almost as dangerous as complete subjectivity.