On axis, R3 (red) vs M16 (blue). As you can see R3 is much more linear.
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This is my grain of salt and, by the way, thanks QMuse for your post.
Usually, people are not used to listening to linear or natural frequency responses and may think it "sounds boring" or "lacks life". The same applies to a professionally calibrated screen next to one with more saturated colors...90% of customers would choose the latter in a showroom.
The thing is that you liked that colored punchy sound in the demo room, or that flashy screen...you set up both on your home and think they are great...but gradually after time you find yourself tweaking because find out that with some specific movies or music find some flaws...
Most of you must be aware of how not level matched A/B benchmarks usually bias for punchier bass, even 2 speakers with a similar response if one is a little bit hotter in levels it feels MUCH better than the other one (same applies to A/B testing DAC's)
QMuse plot of both R3 and M16 demonstrates it. Both are good performers with overall smooth FR but just different tendencies/tastes. M16 has that bump in the lows and a slope down in the highs, so it much resembles our desirable "in-room" target response. R3 are more neutral linear with extended highs, so yeah they could be bright to some folks, but who cares?
Because I would cross both speakers to a subwoofer and then apply parametric EQ (placing sub in the highest output spot of the listening room so you can lower any peaks and ringing). The ideal in-room would be like the Genelec 8341A but with some gain in the 20hz to 100hz region (leave it to taste between 3 to 5 db) like a "hard knee" curve.
This is super easy, you either make little Eq to lower in the 3k to 10k region for R3, or increase a little bit the 200hz to 600hz in the M16 and tame the 5k rise. What matters is having wide dispersion and cohesion so this tweak does not affect the end result.
To summarise, going back to where I talk about tweaking because you don't like the system. If your in-room ends up as it should, after listening for a long time you will find any genre or recording sounds good and start discerning bad recordings instead of bad speakers
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That's something it can't correlate to informal short listening sesions.