Do We Want All Speakers To Sound The Same ?

[MattHooper]

Do We Want All Speakers To Sound The Same?

The thread title may seem a tad hyperbolic, and clearly there will be plenty of nuance involved in replying to such a question.

The question arises first of all because I've seen some criticize Amir and ASR along these lines "That place is boring, they want all speakers to sound the same!"

That strikes me as a caricature. After all, I know members have owned all sorts of different speakers over their audiophile career, and it seems there is some nice variety in member's current speaker set ups.

On the other hand...might there be, in some sense, some element of truth in the proposal "we want all speakers to sound the same?"

After all, any effort to evaluate something like speakers, based on an engineering (and sometimes science) heavy approach will tend to arrive at some sort of "best practices" for speaker design, upon which speakers will be evaluated. It would seem that the general characteristics arrived at from research from Floyd Toole and others have provided such standards for this forum - so ones that are neutral (with the proper off axis response) are selected as "good" and those departing as "poor" to one degree or another.

And since an underlying goal for many ASR members seems to be "accuracy" the logical extension of this would seem to be that the more speakers tend to meet that goal, the more alike they will sound. Which at least implies that if all speaker manufacturers adopted these same goals "ideally" speakers (for any given frequency response) would sound closer to indistinguishable.

It's my impression that some (many?) on ASR would in a sense prefer the speaker to "sound like nothing" in the same sense that a good solid state amp would "sound like nothing." No character of it's own, just neutral, so one isn't 'listening to the system' or thinking about "how the system/speaker sounds" but is simply listening to "the recording."

If much of that does indeed capture some people's goal here, it would imply that..yeah, in some sense, "Ideally, all speakers would sound the same."

I'm not writing any of that to IMPOSE this view on anyone here, only as some talking points to get off the ground. This forum isn't a monolith, it's made of individuals with varying views, so I'm interested in YOUR response to any of these questions:

Would it be THE ideal, or your ideal, that all speakers eventually sound the same, if you could wave your magic wand and send things in that direction? If so why. If not, why not? Should they sound roughly the same, like most should sound close to neutral but you are good with variation in X, Y parameters? Or are you happy with the essentially "Wild West" approach as it has been - some manufacturers striving for neutrality/Toole-approved performance, many heading off in different directions? Do you see the general approach by Amir's approach to evaluating speakers as too narrowly defined and limiting in terms of vetting "bad" from "good" - or does it match your own ideals for performance?

 

[Mr. Widget]

If we assume that everyone wants the happy Pink Panther, then yes, I suppose there is an ideal speaker everyone would aspire to. However speakers being so far from ideal there is plenty of room for deviation from one ideal.

I like your analogy to the acoustic version of a straight wire with gain, and yes, conceptually that seems like a worthy goal.

In practical terms, I think the JBL M2 is about as close to the ideal as has been achieved to date. It is a wonderful speaker, but it would not be my choice in the over $20K per pair market.

 

[Holdt]

Do We Want All Speakers To Sound The Same?

I would.

The goal is a neutral baseline which is a flat response. After that is achieved I apply my own taste in EQ. Why would I shop around all my life for a speaker that sounds "just right" when I can equalize the sucker.. That doesn't mean that alle speakers are equal build though. The construction, drivers, baffles, ports, crossovers, impedance curves, still needs to make a good speaker "baseline" for it to make it great.

I mean, look at what is and has been going on in-ear monitors I.R. to DSP and processing. E.G. apples airpods pro is a one-driver wireless earbud. The driver is supposedly the same as the one they have been using for many years in the standard plastic cheap wired airpods. They apply noise cancellation, DSP to correct for hearing loss via. audiograms, and a frequency response from 30 Hz and up. They sound fantastic. This trend is bleeding over to the hifi speakers as well, as we see more and more applied DSP in active speakers. Take a look at System Audio from Denmark. They are an award winning speaker company and have won several awards from their Silverback line.

https://system-audio.com/product-category/sa-legend-silverback-family/

 

[Keith_W]

We all have different preferences. For me, I do not necessarily want accurate sound. I want it to sound good. Good and accurate are not the same. This is why I add 2nd harmonic distortion to my playback via DSP, play with MSED filters, tune my target curve to my preference which isn't necessarily the Harmann curve, and so on. Now I accept that my preferences are not universal, and what sounds good to me may not sound good to you, and that is fine. Just like I like eating century eggs which you might hate.

I do not want all speakers to sound the same, and they never will unless all of them get together, agree to design a speaker for a standardized room, and then all audio enthusiasts build a standardized room into their homes. That will never happen.

 

[MKR]

If we assume that everyone wants the happy Pink Panther, then yes, I suppose there is an ideal speaker everyone would aspire to. However speakers being so far from ideal there is plenty of room for deviation from one ideal.

I like your analogy to the acoustic version of a straight wire with gain, and yes, conceptually that seems like a worthy goal.

In practical terms, I think the JBL M2 is about as close to the ideal as has been achieved to date. It is a wonderful speaker, but it would not be my choice in the over $20K per pair market.

Excellent discussion and I tend to believe there exists an ”ideal speaker”, which to me is a pure and fully accurate window to the source, nothing more, nothing less. “Acoustic version of a wire with gain” as was stated.

@Mr. Widget As a side question … If not M2, then what would be your choice?

 

[Jim Shaw]

Since flawless reproduction is a myth, and because we are diverse, I suggest that no, we don't long for speakers to all sound the same.

If our idea of music is beating on a log, that will influence our druthers. If it is snare drums, tom toms, high hats, and kick drums, there will be speakers which satisfy that. If we like Frank Sinatra or similar, there are speakers that pimp to that; same for Adelle. If our favorite instrument is the electric guitar or bass, Marshall might be our cup of mud. And so it goes for rap, piano, strings, horns, woodwinds, and tympani.

If we are going to share our speakers with films and TV, we're also wanting to support crashes, gunshots, explosions, dialog, LFE, and dishy music.

A speaker that renders a glorious oboe probably won't be the first pick to do a howitzer.
Different speaker characters are for different tastes... and for different folks.
.....
This is why, before I am interested in a reviewer's upchuck on speaker virtue, I want to know his taste in music. And it's why, if a review is all studded with measurements, I want to know the calibration of his sources and meters to traceable standards. Otherwise, those decibels and percents might all be floating.

It all starts with the source material, flows through the bias of taste, and gets judged by the reviewer's reputation with me. I don't know about others. I'm not buying something for somebody else.

-Just one man's view
Don't even ask about aesthetics of appearance.

 

[Holdt]

We all have different preferences. For me, I do not necessarily want accurate sound. I want it to sound good. Good and accurate are not the same. This is why I add 2nd harmonic distortion to my playback via DSP, play with MSED filters, tune my target curve to my preference which isn't necessarily the Harmann curve, and so on. Now I accept that my preferences are not universal, and what sounds good to me may not sound good to you, and that is fine. Just like I like eating century eggs which you might hate.

I do not want all speakers to sound the same, and they never will unless all of them get together, agree to design a speaker for a standardized room, and then all audio enthusiasts build a standardized room into their homes. That will never happen.

It will become a thing of rarity this. Most speakers will be active and with customizable DSP from an app where you can change sound profiles and frequency response in a second. The "sound profile" from a speaker company will be washed out and be a thing of the past. Like vinyl it will be a niche.

 

[Mr. Widget]

@Mr. Widget As a side question … If not M2, then what would be your choice?

I have spent time with the M2s and they are a very fine speaker. I am particularly impressed with their imaging and the bass quality however there is something about them that I find lacking in the upper mids. This is definitely personal option territory. I could easily have swapped out my current TAD based DIYs for a pair and chose not to.

My current ideal speaker is the exceptionally ugly Meyer Sound Blue Horn.

 

[MKR]

I have spent time with the M2s and they are a very fine speaker. I am particularly impressed with their imaging and the bass quality however there is something about them that I find lacking in the upper mids. This is definitely personal option territory. I could easily have swapped out my current TAD based DIYs for a pair and chose not to.

My current ideal speaker is the exceptionally ugly Meyer Sound Blue Horn.

Got it, thanks. Aren’t those Blue Horns like $80k?

 

[TonyJZX]

doesnt matter what we want

we could ask that all amps sound the same too, like all dacs

but the reality is we have a million companies all with different ideas on what sounds 'good'

 

[rwortman]

The only way to get speakers to sound the same in a room is to make them identical. Every designer has his/her own ideas of what sort of on axis and off axis response makes a speaker sound most natural in a room and listeners have different ideas of what music is supposed to sound like depending on what kind of music they listen to and where. Transparent to the source is meaningless unless the source was an unamplified live recording and you were there. Recordings are mixed and mastered in sound systems and few people are trying to duplicate the studio where there favorite recordings are made. Accurate to the source is mostly a way of saying my preferences are better than yours.

I have heard a drum kit, a sax, a trumpet, a piano, and an acoustic guitar up close with no amplification so I have some reference. I have never heard any of my favorite singers other than through a microphone so I have no acoustic reference for that. I want my speakers to sound good to me. I know that Toole et. al. have shown that certain measurements correlate strongly to listener preference, but even that is not 100% correlation. It’s a place to start. Some people love the sound of dipoles or horns which ignore the spin-o-rama. None of us have flat hearing response. The older we are the worse it gets. That will affect our taste in speakers.

Even if all speakers sound the same in an anechoic test, rooms are different and, more importantly, listeners have different preferences for the amount of room reverberations they like. I don’t think the perfect audiophile speaker would have a fixed sound. It would be able to radiate equally in all directions and have its radiation envelope and frequency response fully tunable in a 360 degree sphere. It would also have inaudible harmonic and IM distortion. Since this isn’t going to happen in my lifetime, there will always be design trade-offs and lots of speakers to choose from.

 

[Hiten]

Same speaker in different size room (Lively or treated) will sound somewhat different. Source of music may be different. Accurate well made speakers are expensive and people have different budget. Not all recordings are good. Since there will not be ultimate accurate speaker some may have brightness or bass enhanced which depending on recording may accentuate or lower instruments/voices anyway. So a workable standardisation to aim for linear, low distortion full range will be good as starting base.
regards.

 

[TonyJZX]

as seen reasonably often on this forum alone, people tend to quite like products that do not measure well... that are shown to be noisy unaccurate and colored... or all the above

i see this myself... i quite like JBL speakers... I know they arent even all that good but i like the JBL 'house' sound

i quite like the Marantz 'house' sound too but i'm not going to defend their choices

 

[DonR]

As noted, they will only sound the same if we all live in identical rooms that are identically furnished and if we all have the same hearing response.

 

[jhaider]

Would it be THE ideal, or your ideal, that all speakers eventually sound the same, if you could wave your magic wand and send things in that direction? If so why. If not, why not?

Personally, I want all speakers to have flattish and smooth on axis response and smooth off axis response with no horizontal dispersion disruptions at crossover points. If it doesn’t meet those criteria it is not interesting to me except as a subject of design failure analysis.

Does that mean they “sound the same?” No, of course not! Pattern width is a matter of both taste and situation. There’s a continuum from monopole, cardioid, and dipole approaches to different bands, as - well as omni-ish and polydirectional. There are differences due to baffle size, and so on.

 

[posvibes]

I have always understood the purpose of the Harman curve has a commercial imperative, if the majority of listeners prefer this over this, then the profitable way to go is to manufacture, market and sell "this". What one may learn on the way, especially in the field of psychoacoustics and other forms of human behaviour is a bonus and well worth exploring.

EQ is the great equalizer (heh! heh!) because are you are given a choice as to what you prefer, and if that changes over the years you can adjust as necessity requires.

I don't have a personal EQ curve, because I don't know how to do that and I am waiting for the next installment from Amir on the REW for dummies blog and in between times I count on the usual suspects from ASR and Github for their expertise on EQ profiles and so far it works a treat.

All of that said, I rarely come across anyone that takes sound seriously, or music for that matter and both simultaneously is as rare as hen's teeth!

 

[YSC]

My answer is: yes and no

assume speakers have perfect FR, perfect directivity, you still have varying beam width, which, depending on your room, one will reign over the other due to reflections. with directivity being consistent, then whatever you want can be dialed in via EQ pretty easily and that works for me at least, for any music or movie lovers, why would one want to play around the hardware but not the content? if all speakers measure the same, it's the best way to make sure the mix is done at the line "as the artist intended"

 

[DavidMcRoy]

I don't think you'd end up forcing people to adopt a strict standard if you tried. For example, despite all data, experience and logic to the contrary, I still cling to electrostatic and planar magnetic panel designs for their unique "je ne sais quoi."

 

[TonyJZX]

i would suspect that most people here would want passive speakers to be as flat and transparent as possible knowing this is largely an impossible task

and leave the processing to your... audio processor.... if you want more bass, dial it in

but at what price does it take and what size speaker does it take to get a pretty flat, transparent speaker???

 

[cavedriver]

Ultimately we'll be limited by the differences in how recordings are made. One mic? stereo? head sound? mixed from multiple mics? Different recordings will require differences in how the music is imaged if they are to make you feel like "being there". Wide baffles, narrow baffles, room EQ, extreme designs like radial speakers, what one technology can flexibly reproduce multiple recording methods and environments? I don't think we are anywhere near achieving this flexibility with one speaker design.

I also wonder about the flaws of speakers like the Genelecs, Neumanns, and D&D's. Even in Amir's review he still says his Revel's are "bigger" sounding with more dynamicism (or something-something, I forget), but for whatever reason, are still "better". So what's left to be better? Also, there's the issue that there must still be speaker performance traits that are not able to be measured by the methods used on this site. For example, the Genelecs have a reported "roughness" when pushed which we apparently can't measure and doesn't show up as distortion in the high decibel graphs, but has been cited as a flaw of the speakers before obvious clipping. So a speaker with the best listening score on this site, that's regarded as being about as good as it gets, still has flaws and is bettered by other speakers? Further support that (much?) better speakers are out there.