Lol, this whole thread is a joke. I’m very familiar with the Primus line. Hell I own a 6.1 Primus P363 setup. The Sierra-2’s destroy them. Not even close. Funny everyone chalks up user preferences to cognitive dissonance, except their own. Embarrass? Whats embarrassing is people blindly trusting one model of preference as an end-all speaker performance metric. I’m living in a bizarro reality where good measurements are interpreted as catastrophic.
It’s becoming more apparent that this methodology is too limited in scope and weighted too heavily on a system that many can attest as inaccurate. Good measurements are being hailed as inadequate. Its only obvious to me because I’m oddly aquainted with most of the speakers in question. If the pioneers are going to be touted as unbeatable end-game then theres a major factor missing. Its a remarkable budget speaker. Nothing more, and its limitations were even outlined in the review.
While I agree people are taking the score too seriously, the fact of the matter is that based on what we know about speakers and preference, the Infinity's do seem to be better. They measure really well.
That doesn't negate your opinion of them, certainly not your sighted one. But ultimately all the score is doing is condensing some of that data.
On the other hand, the only reason there is an issue here is that the data differs substantially from Ascend's provided measurements. If this weren't the case, I don't think anyone would have an issue. Ascend's measurements of this speaker look pretty fantastic. Amir's look good, not great (by the standards of 'great' we've seen so far).
To be clear, this isn't to say ascend's measurements are false. I'm simply pointing out the discrepancy that's leading to both the score and discussion being what it is. Someone mentioned the possibility of a damaged or deteriorated speaker, and though I don't have a real reason to believe that's the case, we saw it happen with the Kali LP-6.
It is also worth noting that I found these results surprising given that the two other ascend speakers have been measured by the NRC measure quite well and both track ascend's measurements more closely. See, for example, the CBM-170 (
ascend,
NRC). That seems like a remarkable pair of speakers for $300 by the way - I'm not sure I've ever seen $300 speakers measure so well. EDIT: Oh boy, I just saw see Amir reviewed those speakers too. Here we go again... His measurements show significantly less energy from about 700Hz down which will definitely throw off the tonal balance...
All that being said, I go back and forth on the utility of the preference score because these discussions keep coming up where people seem to ignore the score context. What the preference score tells you is expected preference within the comfort zone of two speakers. If you have a tiny pair of studio monitors that are super linear but start to compress at 70dB they are going to lose to less linear speakers speaker with better SPL capabilities.
There will definitely be times when cheap old speakers beat expensive new ones - Harman seems to have seen this happen plenty of times with its own designs, with cheaper speakers beating more expensive ones within certain playback limits. But for the added price, you normally get speakers that are able to maintain their preference abilities in a multitude of listening scenarios.