I have exactly that (cage bare and cage with absorber). I shared one of these samples as a quick check and it is posted here and got compared with no cage and with different settings. So I provided the context for that.
I'm a bit confused, does this mean you've done three measurements of the Genelec in total?
1. Test using exactly the same method as per the previous speakers (with mic cage, symmetrical option unchecked)
2. Test without the mic cage, symmetrical option unchecked (the measurements of which you've shown in the review)
3. Test without the mic cage, but with padding around the speaker, and symmetrical option checked
Is this correct? And is it the test results from method 1 above that you provided to
@MZKM which he showed in
this post, for which he calculated a preference score 0.5 points lower than the one for your review results (test 2 above)?
I don't think that is the case. The slight ripple here only matters when the speaker has very flat response. Otherwise it gets lost in the noise of high level of variations. This is why Klippel has not focused on fixing this problem even though they are well aware of it.
I'm not sure I follow the bit in bold. Is this what Klippel told you, or is this conjecture? (Or both?) I would have thought the original sound field from the speaker and the sound field from the reflections off the mic cage would superpose, with the resultant sound field measured by the mic being the sum of the two, meaning it could have at some frequencies an amplitude higher than the original sound from the speaker, ultimately resulting in the frequency response becoming more uneven. I don't really see how this would be any different for a speaker with non-flat frequency response - I would think it would just make an uneven response more uneven, and also erroneously affect the calculated preference rating, like we've seen it did with the Genelec.
If Klippel's not willing to test this, the only way to know for sure is for you to test a speaker with non-flat response twice - once as per your original Genelec measurements with the mic cage on, and again without the mic cage, and compare the difference/correction curve for these two measurements with the correction curve for the two Genelec measurements with and without the mic cage.