And your solution is what? That I listen in stereo in a random room, with random content and provide a random subjective remark of 'how they sound'?
Maybe?
For ASR, and today, the answer is
probably not.
Stereo speakers = more shipping cost, more boxes, more carrying speakers, more setup, more time spent, etc.
Here is another thing to think about: assessing subjectively factors like soundstage is extremely hard and effectively impossible to do reliably.
^^^ and this is problem #2.
But when you look at something like Magnepan speakers which have stayed in business when companies like Snell, Thiel, Infinity (audiophile home), Citation (audiophile cinema) have not, there has to be something about the sound that might be preferred by some.
We KNOW the LRS measures poorly.
We KNOW that stereo playback masks the the frequency response and tonality irregularities.
Is it all sighted bias? Or do the characteristics of a planar soundstage boost the stereo bonus to a greater degree? Is it ignorance? That as good as the LRS’s are in stereo, someone would prefer a more traditional setup with a higher preference score in the same price point?
Looking at Dr Toole’s comments about setups other than direct radiating speakers being special effects with limited predictability, does it turn out that it happens to work in 90% of rooms and recordings? Or 50%? Or 25% jazz and classical and 15% of rock?
What sort of content do Magnepan owners enjoy?
Right now, the Preference score is one of the best tools we have, but it’s just Project Mercury. We are showing that it is possible to quantify preference based upon the Spinorama with pretty convincing accuracy in mono, and when translated into stereo the overall trends remain.
But no one sticks to mono listening even though
1) most
live amplified concerts are mono
2) I could get a better speaker that way by moving up the product line and just getting one instead of two speakers. Why buy a stereo pair of JBL L100’s when I can just get one JBL 4349 for the same price?
We enjoy stereo.
When you started ASR, you set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all audiophiles. Magazines have always had measurements but you took it to the next step and brought science to the art of music reproduction. You have a lot of members who share this vision.
The next frontier has to be the science of stereo loudspeakers. When this decade was started, many of us probably looked at fancy audiophile cables and line conditioners. We poured over amplifier topologies.
Today, we all know that speakers and recordings are the true arbiter of sound.
“
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Why don’t we, as a community, take on the challenge of quantifying soundstage? What are the musical genres or specific music tracks that highlight this? What are the speakers with popularity that defies the predicted performance based upon the monaural spin?
What happens if I run the NFS with the mic in an equilateral triangle with a stereo pair of speakers so it is sampling at the MLP?
You should get some messy response but maybe if we can agree on speakers that have above or below average soundstage, we may be able to put the data it into a machine learning algorithm
Or maybe even as an experiment,
what if you run the NFS with a stereo pair of speakers wired in phase versus out of phase with the mic sampling at the virtual equilateral triangle portion?