And as promised, here is the manufacturers response on the Volti Audio Rival:
Volti Rival
Editor:
Thank you for a well-written article, Ken Micallef. I’m glad you had fun with the Rival speakers. Thank you, John Atkinson. I know how much work it was to do those measurements, and I have to say that they look very similar to mine. A couple of things to note:
First, regarding John’s discovery of the elevated tweeter and woofer response in relation to the midrange: I supply a resistor kit with each pair of Rival speakers, and if the end user wishes to flatten out the frequency response of the speaker by raising the output of the midrange, it is easily done. Also related to this, the adjustment that KM referred to with the midrange was to turn it down a bit more from the factory setting. Interesting, heh?
Second, I put extensive time into figuring out how much bracing and damping I wanted to put into the cabinet. I found that too much bracing/damping killed the musicality of the speaker, and too little made things busy and noisy. I know we are all “trained” to believe that there should be no cabinet resonances. My experience in listening to music with speakers that are overdamped says otherwise. There’s a fine line here.
I can’t think of a more conspicuous example of how speaker measurements simply do not portray how a speaker sounds than the dichotomy between KM’s review and JA’s testing. But this example goes beyond that, because here we have accurate measurements that illustrate exactly how the designer intended the speaker to sound.
My concern isn't that the measurements published here reflect poorly on the design, or what effect that may or may not have on my business; it's that we have now exposed to our industry some of the ways I accomplish my goals of building speakers that sound the way they do.
There’s a sound in my head that I’m chasing, and getting that sound out of a new speaker design is the most important aspect of the design to me. Speaker performance measurements are very important during the development, and I measure constantly as I’m working out the final voicing of the speaker. But after the design is done, the final measurements are of little value to me. When a design is complete and I’m happy with all aspects of it, I would certainly not change anything about it that would change the sound only for the sake of improving the measured performance.
Knowing how they measure doesn’t change how they sound, but I believe that changing the design so that they measure better would. I don’t have one single customer who would accept changes in the sound of their speakers for the sake of better measurements.
I have lots more to say on this subject, but I’ll save it for my newsletter.
I think John said it best in his summary: “‘Listen for yourself.’” In-home Rival demos are available.
Greg Roberts Volti Audio
