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?
It's already questionable if acquiring and setting up sound reproduction equipment is a hobby in the general sense. If one buys the objectivist kool-aid and think that the electronics part of the equation is solved, then just about anyone can purchase and set up a complete system that is near endgame quality, in a week, for a few thousand euros/dollars, with no previous knowledge of the subject. Spend a bit more and the dealer will bring the goods and sets things up for you. If a cheap, well measuring and somewhat compact full range speaker would exist (like 500€ Dutch&Dutch 8C) there wouldn't be that much to discuss any more.
