Thanks for the thoughtful reply back! My chat with Anssi was just to get more background -- not a formal interview =]
To address some of your points:
- I feel you on the criticism of those brands. Sometimes its exaggerated, sometimes it's more justified. I think it depends on the individual speaker too. And sometimes even with the same data, our interpretation might differ.
- I think an issue that is often an unspoken undertone inn these debates is the lack of standards in audio. This contributes to what Floyd Toole calls the "circle of confusion." In visual media like film, you have strict standards you can adhere to so you can ensure the picture in theaters or at home is as close as possible to how it was in the editing room. Audio could be much more consistent, but so long as people keep recording, mixing, and mastering on equipment that varies so dramatically in frequency response, audio is always going to have a significant grey area for performance and accuracy.
To me, advocating for flat frequency response and smooth directivity isn't just about enjoyment or accuracy, it's about helping to propagate some standards in audio. Marketing is always talking about "hear the music as the artist intended!" but the only way we can really do that is if the sound in the home is as close to the studio as possible. There's always going to be some room-related variability, but there's also a lot more we can control for than we currently do.
- How Genelec and Amphion say they measure their speakers almost surely has little do with the end result. The vast majority of anechoic chambers aren't very accurate below 100hz or so, so companies have different ways of figuring out the lowest frequencies. Some (most?) of them use ground-plane measurements, others use the NFS now. Still others put their speakers on a giant crane. Half space measurements is just how amphion chooses to quantify and display their bass performance.
- Before I talk about bass -- did you have both speakers calibrated to your room with a similar bass tuning? If a speaker has more bass, chances are it's going to sound slower/boomier around frequencies that excite room nodes.
- My first thought would be that because the amphion on-18 begin to roll-off gently at around 100Hz (compared a steep roll off at 60Hz for the genelec), there'll be less ringing at those frequencies. In any case, as bass is inexorably tied to the room, we need to put the speakers on a level playing field before making a comparison. There are other things that can affect the perception of bass "speed" but I believe you always have to eliminate frequency response as a factor first.That said, bass tuning is certainly a design consideration, but it'll naturally vary from room to room. I prefer a slight bass roll-off myself.
- So the ironic thing about your penultimate sentence is that in general it's the hi-fi crowd that really has poorly performing speakers outside of some standouts. Most studio monitors are still "flattish," in the grand scheme of things and the Amphions definitely fall under that umbrella. The same cannot be said for most hi-fi speakers.
Sometimes ASR and other objectivist parts of the audio community skew perspective. People around these parts are exceptionally picky about what crosses the threshold of "good" because the Klippel NFS and more measurements in general have made it easier to separate the very best from the rest. But I definitely think people are too picky sometimes. In the grand scheme of things, every amphion measurement I've seen has been tonally neutral with solid directivity. They're not picture-perfect measurements at the state of the art, but I'd argue they're well within the realm of diminishing returns.
If you're really interested in learning more, you should check out Floyd Toole's book. Not that you should have to read a book just to have discussion about audio, but it is a gold mine of knowledge and a very useful reference full of indexed topics and listed academic sources. It answers some of these questions better than I ever could.
