Mountains of research evidence was given further up this thread, none of which were engaged with, and instead patronisingly dismissed with anecdotal experience.
No. No research was presented further up this thread. No useful research, anyway. Only Toole and Olive.
I don't want this to be a TLDR, but let's take a minute to ground ourselves. Useful research begins - as experienced researchers like
@SIY often point out - by being
exact about the question you need to answer. No doubt Toole knows that too, having been educated at Imperial College, which was - and remains - a very sound engineering school.
So what question did Toole formulate? His research was started at a government-funded research institute in Canada, whose mandate was - and remains - explicitly to aid Canadian industry with relevant R&D. Not a pure science endeavor, but economic help for the nation.
Thus Toole's exact question was, "What kind of loudspeakers should Canadian manufacturers produce, in order to attract large numbers of mainstream consumers who listen in conventional domestic rooms?"
To his great credit, he answered that question meticulously.
But it's an irrelevant question for studio situations, where the demands are completely different, where the users are not mainstream consumers, and the rooms are not conventional domestic spaces. Therefore his research contributes
nothing to this discussion. Relying on it out of context is dumb. It's like saying, ".22 Long Rifle works great for varmint hunting, so why the hell do the armored divisions need uranium-tipped long-rod penetrators for tank ammunition?"
The
actually relevant research has been carried out piecemeal, and internally, and intensely, over many decades, within a small community of specialist users and specialist manufacturers. The result is a handful of trusted principles and brands that do the job the specialist users need to do.
Thus the top picks for studio production tasks turn out to be different than the top picks for domestic reproduction tasks. Why is this surprising to anyone?
I bet if Toole had been hired by a different institution, and his exact question had been about studio use, his answer would have confirmed the conclusions we have reached anyway.