What do cable peddler's argue? I use Blue Jeans cables. What am, I missing out?
They substitute buyer's testimonies for actual scientific measurements.
Are you suggesting Harbeth aren't audio engineers? It was founded by Dudley Harwood who was the Head of Research of the BBC for 30 years and the BBC basically invented broadcasting and much of its technology. They were the first and largest national broadcaster in the world, and still are. They also probably record and broadcast more music and speech than any other organisation.
Any more, and I'm going to think that you're shilling. Should I list all the fallacious "arguments"?
1) Harbeth is a company whose goal is to sell. They might be engineers, but the primary goal is still to sell, and if making bad speakers sells, they'll do it (not that they make bad speakers on purpose).
2) You can be an engineer and not up-to-date with the technology of your own field. An "engineer" that doesn't use computer modelisation and extensive measurements is simply obsolete, these days, in almost any field. And I say that as a computer scientist surrounded by "engineers" that know nothing outside of what's needed to keep their job (and not excel at it).
3) The founder is not the entire company. The BBC isn't a sacred cow and research has evolved (way) further than the LS3/5. Reminds me of a discussion I had here about a laughable paper the BBC put out where it tried to prove that HEVC was good by using PSNR (not PSNR-HVS) as a metric; which is a joke for anyone with any knowledge in the image field. Note that the BBC is in an HEVC patent pool.
Appeal to authority has no place here, anyway.
Measurements are a very good way of ensuring a speaker is not faulty, but not if it is any good.
Two can play the game of listing names: go tell that to Genelec, Neumann or Revel. Or simply bring one hard evidence that known measurements don't paint the entire picture, as far as the ear goes.
The human brain is exceptionally good at recognising sound patterns. There are 7 billion people on this planet, but if someone you know well phoned you on a poor line from the other side of the world, the chances are you could identify them from their speech alone.
Speakers don't care about content. Voice is just a band limited signal like others, which can be reproduced easily.
Most speaker designers will tell you speech is the acid test, because you cannot fool anyone with it.
Designers which are also sellers. Designers that need to act as storytellers to sell, which are not all designers. Show me hard evidence about these claims, anyway (that "most speaker designers" say so, and that voice is something special).
One reason why the BBC spent so much on speaker design was because they broadcast so much speech, in hundreds of languages, globally, and that was in the 1930s. There are plenty of speakers that measure very well and fail the basic live vs. recorded speech test.
If we go by Edison, the perfect speaker was invented way before the BBC appeared. Of course, now we know this isn't true. Same for the BBC designs.
But if you are happy you are to judge any product solely by its measurements on the basis that everything audible can be measured, then I hope you don't design speakers for a living.
Once again, you prove that you don't belong in here. If you said "we lack crucial metrics", you'd be almost right, because distorsion metrics, for example, aren't very accurate (though I think that THD+IMD is quite good already). But by implying that there's stuff we will never be able to measure, you outed yourself as nothing more than a classic audiophile, happily wallowing in ignorance and telling us ghost stories.
Reading Toole's book (and here I agree with
@tuga, read, don't become a follower) should be mandatory before posting here.
