Indeed, multi-channel is a whole 'nother animal. My focus in this thread is definitely on stereo, but this is worth keeping in mind.
While there were stereo listening sessions, the actual blind tests
were conducted in mono. Stereo listening tests were just for fun.
"Don't forget, everyone, we will follow up the blind mono listening tests with stereo listening sessions of each speaker. The caveat is that these will not be blinded.
Idea being that it will be fun to just listen to stereo music with both excellent speakers once we go through the trials. "
There is no reason for me to believe changing the room would have a significant effect on the results based on what we know about being able to hear "through" the room. While I think speakers with clear flaws can benefit from certain rooms (for example, one with awful vertical directivity may benefit from very high ceilings), in general, good speakers should sound good in any room.
I think more likely to cause a change would be who is involved in the listening tests. Some people just prefer narrow directivity.
While not immediately evident from the spins, if at all, looking at normalized SPL curves from Stereophile makes it very clear the Ultima series has wider directivity than the lower-end revels. I'd bet a good buck that's the main reason.
For example, here's Performa F228Be, which seems to have prettier spins with less of crossover dip:
View attachment 48922
And here's the Salon2:
View attachment 48923
The F228Be dips by 18dB at 90 degrees and ~8Khz. The Salon2 is down just 12.
The Salon2 simply has much wider directivity in the front horizontal hemisphere, and it will almost certainly sound "bigger" and more expansive.
That said, it's also worth remembering that the blind studies generally compare speakers within a wide range of price brackets and performance metrics. Not having seen data comparing
only upper echelon speakers, it could very well be possible that other factors like distortion, compression, transients, etc have more of an impact in, say, the top 10 percent of speakers. I'd imagine that, past a certain degree of FR linearity and even dispersion, the circle of confusion will likely make it too difficult to puzzle out meaningful differences just from frequency response, at least not without testing an exorbitant number of songs for a better statistical sample.
While I definitely agree recording technique has some influence, I still think people will tend to gravitate towards wider dispersion. No stereo recording is an accurate capture of a live soundfield - only a better or worse fascimile. I just think wide dispersion makes it easier to make that illusion seem realistic. On a similar topic, Toole says (again, in that AVS forums about the Salon2 vs M2):
"Highly rated loudspeakers in mono listening tend to draw less attention to the fact that all of the sound is emerging from a point in space. Some amount of this is unavoidable - there is only one loudspeaker - but when they are free from non-musical audible artifacts like resonances, distortion (not normally an issue), and when there are some room reflections to put the speaker into an acoustical context, the image is less of an exaggerated pin point. Audiophiles might call this "air'. So there are two positive attributes in loudspeakers to look for - an absence of resonances and uniformly wide dispersion.
Recording engineers, when creating a soundstage, may prefer pin-point localization so that they can follow their electronic manipulations. Control rooms are sometime quite dead, and "near field" monitoring is common. However, at home, listening for pleasure, they too exhibit a preference for more reflected sound. Mastering engineers who leave their imprint on recordings just before we get to hear them, prefer to listen through high quality wide dispersion Hi Fi loudspeakers in relatively normal rooms. They hear something like what we hear. That is good, it helps to alleviate the circle of confusion. "
That last paragraph is really key, I think. pin-point imaging can be useful, and some people always prefer it over an expansive soundstage. But overall, I very much suspect wide directivity is more likely to create an illusion that is
convincing even if it might not transport you to the space as effectively (and personally, no narrow directivity speaker really does that except in some rare cases. There's still too much of the room)
