It seems to me that there is a range of performance measures for speakers that affect their ability to meet needs in any particular use case. In no particular order:
1. Lack of resonances. We don't want speakers ringing at certain frequencies for whatever reason--such is often audible and annoying.
2. Reasonably flat anechoic on-axis frequency response, even if it requires equalization. If the on-axis response isn't flat, and we make it even more non-flat to compensate for some non-flat influence from the room, we end up with flat frequency response from only one reliable location. We might get lucky at other locations.
3. Directivity that is tonally sensible off-axis. That means that the tonality of what is sent off-axis bears close enough relationship to what is presented axially that the reflections in the room seem realistic.
4. Dynamic contrast. If the compliance around the drivers becomes elastically non-linear when reaching the limits of its excursion (and assuming the voice coil doesn't mechanically bottom out), the frequencies provided by that driver will not be as loud relative to lower levels as is the signal from the recording. This changes the spectral response if it only happens to one driver, and it will probably affect lower frequencies more than higher frequencies. If all the drivers behave similarly (they won't), then the speaker might simply be unable to play the loud bits as loud relative to the soft bits as was provided on the recording, but without an obvious tonal change. The bigger the room and the higher the demand for listening level (and the smaller the speaker), the more likely this effect will become a noticeable fault. Just like amp clipping, this seems to me to overwhelm other effects in those cases where it is an issue. Isn't this what the additional bass driver in the Salon towers provide compared to, say, the Concerta towers--the ability to get louder without the the bass drivers running out of steam? (Maybe a bad example: Soundstage's measurements at the NRC anechoic chamber of the two didn't note much difference in bass distortion, and the F12 actually had better linearity with respect to 70 dB output when playing at 95 dB. About 5 dB greater sensitivity, too. The Salon also has an additional mid-range driver and much lower distortion around 1KHz, however--that's the significant difference.) Isn't this one of the things that distinguishes large speakers from small speakers? I suspect this effect was not measured in most of Floyd's work, but I may have just missed it. I doubt his preference tests were conducted loudly enough to test compression, especially in the smaller test room. I don't think subwoofers, which are often crossed over well below the crossover between the woofer and the higher drivers, can make up for this if the speakers show a lack. Many will not undertake this use case, but some certainly do. I really don't think my Concerta F12's could make the same dynamics as, say, an Altec A7, which was designed for a much different use case with much larger rooms, even though I know I can play them very loudly.
5. Lack of distortion. At some point, distortion becomes audible. If the distortion in the bass driver is at, say, over 10% (not really that uncommon), the distortion components will be hearable in a comparison, sighted or not, it seems to me. I can hear it. I think this is what makes tubas and french horns sound like trombones--an effect I have experienced in a listening test when I had no knowledge of or interest in the different speakers being demonstrated. The addition of high-frequency distortion products can make that tonal difference.
6. I hesitate to add this, because I've never detected any difference between speakers I could attribute to it: time alignment.
Some of these things are definitely audible. I've heard speakers that were so emphasized in high frequencies that they had a frying-bacon effect. I've heard speakers that distorted so easily in the bass that tubas became trombones or euphoniums when the listening level was increased (NOT when the performer was playing louder). I've heard speakers that muffle loud transients because the driver excursion limits were being reached. I've heard systems that went from realistic to crazy just by walking across the room, even in a room where live performers sound much more consistent from different listening locations. In the times I have set up sound systems, such as at my church, I used careful equalization using calibrated microphones and loudspeakers selected with considerable intentionality, and still noted that in this back corner, treble was suppressed, etc. Having the measurement capability didn't prevent me from using my ears, though it did prevent me from trusting my ears too much.
Finally, about preference testing: The preference results were not unanimous, and the correlations were reasonably strong from a statistical perspective only in the realm of human sensitivities and opinions, where unexplained variability is the frequent result. They describe a sampling of preferences that, because of those statistics, are demonstrated not to be the product of mere chance but that are actually representative, at some level, of the population at large. If we describe those preferences as a random variable described by some probability distribution, we can use the results as a model of what most people prefer. Of course, all models are false, even if some are useful. But it does not state what I may prefer, or what you may prefer, if we, for whatever reason, find ourselves on the tails of that distribution. As such, it's much more instructive to manufacturers because it tells them what the center of the market prefers and therefore what they should design for. It's not necessarily instructive to me, individually, except to suggest that I may have trained myself, intentionally or not, to have preferences outside the norm and perhaps I should consider that.
So, when Floyd makes statements like "people like bass," he's describing a reasonably well-correlated effect from studies, but not necessarily Rick. "People" may like a lot more bass than, say, tuba players, who live in the bass world and want to hear distinctions that may be lost on others. "People" may like bass even when it is distorted at 10% or more, even though the instrument has characteristic overtones at the same levels (20 dB down) as the loudest distortion products. Example: Mr. Gene Pokorny (of the Chicago Symphony) recorded a CD full of orchestral excerpts some years ago, for the benefit of tuba players. In some of the excerpts, he used a B&S F tuba, and in some, he used the CSO's York C tuba that was previously owned by Arnold Jacobs. Most people can't tell the difference listening to the recording, despite that the two instruments are vastly different in size and breadth of sound. Any tuba player can. I've heard well-recorded Youtube videos of orchestral performers comparing similar grand orchestral tubas to that York, and heard distinctions in headphones that speakers in a room did not reveal. Most people would neither care nor notice, of course. (I am certainly NOT suggesting that musicians make good audio system listeners--in my experience their systems don't consistently sound good and it may be that musicians are just good at filling in the blanks from their experience. I'm just suggesting that musicians may be very specific in what they are listening for that is not represented at all in the sorts of preference testing done by Toole, Olive, and so on.)
Ears do matter. The problem is that they are so dominated by eyes and brains, which are easily and uncontrollably swayed by inaudible effects. But that we can't fully trust our ears for making choices in the presence of sighted bias doesn't mean that we still don't use our ears to hear and make judgments about what our systems produce.
Rick "has said all this before" Denney
) have never ABX'ed them. I imagine if I did, they would be fairly easy to distinguish between many other speakers, but I also imagine their flaws would be less apparent in the typical ABX test method. You kind of have to marinate in these things to notice how utterly odd they sound.
