Per the usual your comments are fantastic and...
This.
While sounding good, all three sound different.
You must listen, which I felt/perceived was the point most strongly made in that Tube vid.
You are a professional reviewer and have many products come and go and you get paid for your time spent with them. Which one of these 3 do you recommend? I bet you recommend them all, but to different folks & I further my wager that you have a personal favorite that you would pick if like a "normal person" you had to live with that speaker and that speaker alone, for the next 5 years.
(*by the way I'd be really interested in hearing about which one of those three you would pick and why - I am thinking about buying a pair of HDI1600's OR L82's)
I am sorta like a mini reviewer due to trying so much gear and I have a pair or two that I would save in a fire and many others that I might actually be happy to claim insurance on despite the fact that they do sound good.
While hopefully all here @ ASR are truly lovers of sound and music, we are surely nerds. We are audiophile nerds and secretly want to be the next human with a Kipple being installed in our garage(man 1st I wish I had a real garage) and get pissed when reviews don't have spins and we might get immersed in the next issue of Voice Coil test bench pondering raw drivers.
All these measurements here are way, way beyond what IMHO the typical buyer want to ingest & in no way is that lack of interest in the tests here a measure of their interest in listing to good sound. They want good sound not a membership in the audio club.
So how does one reach them with speakers that measure well, without talking about that, as talking about that will not help in this hypothetical case. (In fact it may even turn them off, yah)
As someone who writes excellent detailed reviews (& I mean yours are really wonderful and you clearly have a passion and a talent for them), how to do help someone chose a speaker in real life. Someone you meet or someone who is friend, not someone who is getting info from your published reviews - which for them may actually be far to nerdy and in depth. What is the most basic, basic stuff?
Thank you for enjoying my comments. I definitely tend to spend too much time on them! And I will do so again to address some of your points:
You are right that I do recommend all three of the speakers, but still have preferences. However when you say 'you
must listen,' (emphasis mine), I disagree. At least, from the perspective of someone in the market for new speakers.
Of course, the ultimate judgement of any speaker happens when you listen to it in your own home for an extended period of time. But for the vast majority of audio enthusiasts, saying "you must listen" is meaningless. Extremely few people have access to a showroom with all the speakers they want to test, or are able to buy them all and return them. Even if you did, you would need an exorbitant amount of time to do proper comparisons taking into account positioning and the like.
This is why people turn to reviewers in the first place: to get an authoritative recommendation. Without being able to test a variety of options on their own, they want to know "How likely is it that I will like speaker X?" And this is just one reason why measurements matter: they are a more reliable predictor of preference than subjective opinion alone.
Consider this: Sometimes people ask me to A/B speakers directly, but I prefer to let the measurements do the talking. After all the speakers I've tested, I have increasingly found sighted A/B stereo tests with the speakers adjacent to one another to be almost useless. Or worse, they can actually be damaging.
For example, when I got the KEF LS50 Meta, I originally placed it right on top of the Choras, which have been my 'reference' speaker since I first reviewed them. I could have
sworn the Meta was in another league of performance in terms of detail and neutrality. The difference just seemed
so obvious. I even posted about this in the forum a while back, I believe.
I was almost beginning to believe that the reason for this obvious improvement must be the fancy new metamaterials, because I couldn't explain why the KEF sounded so obviously better. The measurements were a bit better, but not that much better.
Well, it turns out that ever so slight difference in positioning was for some reason giving the KEF an edge. I flipped the setup with the Choras on top of the KEFs, and suddenly the Choras sounded better! Womp womp.
I believe the reason for this may be that I have a lot of absorptive materials close to the speaker at the lower height. The speaker on 'top' instead gets more of the reflective wall that better matches the opposite side of the room. A few brief measurements seemed to back this up, though it's something I'm still investigating.
Still it was just another bit of evidence about the unreliability of a poorly-controlled, sighted listening test.
You're right that I do have a preference. After extended listening, without direct direct comparison, I've concluded the LS50 Meta is slightly more neutral with slightly better imaging, but I personally prefer the wider directivity/more expansive soundstage of the Chora (as I've noted many times here, I'm a sucker for wide directivity). Nonetheless I'd recommend the Metas to most people if price isn't a factor. (Not addressing the JBL yet because I've only had it for a week. It has the most bass though, so it may be the easiest to recommend).
But here's the thing: the measurements already told me that. I know I like wide directivity. I knew the KEF would likely be more neutral. You could of course say that I was biased by my measurements, but it has been my consistent experience that listening impressions rarely deviate from what I expect from measurements.
That actually brings up an important point. I think a subjective-only comparison would tend to exaggerate the difference between these speakers. When doing direct comparisons it is very easy to hone in on and exaggerate tiny differences that you'd hardly care about otherwise and can vary simply with a change in positioning.
Here too, measurements provide important perspective. All the speakers are good, and I do not have a strong opinion on which is better. And thanks okay.
As for the idea that the people on ASR are just nerds who want to look at all the measurements, I'm not sure that's fully representative. I don't think the problem is that the typical audio enthusiasts are not interested in data, the problem they've been told are assume the data is not sufficient to provide an accurate recommendation. It's not foolproof, but all the research points to measurements being more reliable predictors of preference and enjoyment.
As I've noted before, my reviews have actually started getting a lot more reads since I started including measurements. Despite this, very often I receive emails from people telling me they don't know how to read the graphs themselves, but they appreciate the analysis of the data.
And that's kind of my point. While I encourage people to learn the science, I don't think every audio enthusiast needs to capture and/or interpret the data. I don't expect readers to know what a spin is. That is a job for
reviewers.
Even then, I've said multiple times on this forum that I don't think subjective-only reviews should disappear. I think they often describe details of sound quality correctly. And I think measurements can be misinterpreted too.
I just think the way the language and interpretation around subjective reviews needs to change. There's too much fluff, with speakers and headphones afforded almost mythical qualities through years of marketing spin, hearsay, and dogma. Even if most reviewers continue to only focus on subjective reviews, having more speaker measurements accessible to more people provides an important reality check.
You ask how I help people choose speakers in real life. Simple: I explain the basics of measurements to them. I tell them: this speaker is flatter and has smooth directivity (which is a lot easier to explain when you can use gestures!. And that science suggests if a speaker has a flat frequency responseand good directivity, you're more likely to enjoy it, and it's more likely to faithfully reproduce the recording. They usually understand.
And if there are many options with good measurements in their budget, I just tell them to just pick the one they think is prettiest.
So yes, listen when you can, but don't assume you
must listen in order to make a wise purchasing decision.