When it comes to engineering, is there a more practical end than designing a product that matches your capabilities? Developing and building a product that exceeds our capabilities is merely an unnecessary spending of resources to suit someones vanity.
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Master Preference Ratings for Loudspeakers
- Thread starter MZKM
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When it comes to engineering, is there a more practical end than designing a product that matches your capabilities? Developing and building a product that exceeds our capabilities is merely an unnecessary spending of resources to suit someones vanity.
Amir shared a paper with me where they used Olive’s formula and got negative scores when testing flat-panel speakers.
You will soon hear what you deserve for posting such nonsense from your neighbour from Tampa Bay as soon as he wakes up !
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Btw, the sense of our capabilities has changed massively. I read recommendations from Fletcher's book 1950s Speech & Hearing about how communications system should be developed (same Fletcher from the Fletcher & Munson curves). Using their available techniques he analyzed the spectral content of spoken syllables as defined by linguistics, and then related it to the knowledge of the hearing system. He concluded that all important activity took place in the region up to 4kHz and that the important harmonics stretch up to 8kHz. So that was that for telephones and radio for a while. (Btw the phone system at work right now works on an 8kHz sampling rate... so that tells you how this stuff tends to stick.)
Toole's is the first serious research which combines every aspect, end-to-end, of psychoacoustics and engineering for loudspeaker design and music reproduction. We simply have nothing else to go which is as comprehensive or as well considered for our purposes and goals.
Indeed it is. And it is all about linearity of direct and reflected sound, while everything else doesn't seem to metter. But we only have limited sense for linearity so what will we do once we reach it?
Not to mention that 99% of the folks on this forum doesn't really understand and accept that as they would be applying room EQ to get linear response from their speakers. Instead, they are more concerned about THD and other stuff which Toole clearly found to be far far less important than linearity. Just look at the recent example from KH80 thread..
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Bundles/discounts/sales in different regions are difficult to keep track, so if you use MSRP (USD), it's so much easier on you.
That center channel will be an issue when you plot it on a scatter chart, so maybe use the price as a pair (ex. 2 of those centers used as stereo) to match the rest of the stereo speakers.
I think the scatter plot (with log scaling) works. Thanks!
Yeah, but they (and earpieces) remain pretty much the only performing part of a hifi (unless you include watching blinking LEDs or wavy lines on a display).
I can't trust anything I say...
Bought a new TV, thought the speakers inside it sounded pretty good until I hooked up the optical output.
The famous chart almost goes negative on the speakers similar to mine:
I suppose they didn't permit scores below zero. An average of 0.5 or so is interesting. That's getting down there. How many zeroes were submitted?
I suppose the speakers didn't meet the criteria for which the listeners had been primed to score in the environment in which they were tested.
If your test criteria is for blondness of hair, blueness of eyes, and fairness skin, that will likely eliminate a great number of adequate alternatives.
I'd assume you'd get far less predictive accuracy than the 0.86 correlation factor with the preference rating metric once you have several speakers above a certain number, probably around 8 or so.
Once above a certain point other factors will come into play and sway expected results all over the place, I assume.
Once above a certain point other factors will come into play and sway expected results all over the place, I assume.
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Would be nice to have the spin data for the flat panel, and it's preference score on the formula.Amir shared a paper with me where they used Olive’s formula and got negative scores when testing flat-panel speakers
It depends a bit on the context a bit. What type of deviations(resonances? axial deviations? tilt?) we're talking about and with what program material. Resonances as we know are particularly audible. I present this image again:
Moreover toole notes that, contrary to my intuition, resonances are actually more audible in a typical reflective environment than a dead room or (needless to say) an anechoic chamber.
It seems to me in general, that we are incredibly sensitive to small deviations, but the circle of confusion affects that sensitivity. We can hear tiny deviations in pink noise and spectrally complex music, but these songs will have their own deviations. So there unless the industry starts to standardize recording and mixing, will always be a limit to how good our speakers can sound with all music. It's just the limit is implied by the music, not by how good our speakers can get.
If we're including all the curves as you said, I think if any passive speaker can, it might be a KEF. Especially if the formula used listening window instead of on-axis. KEF-provided Spinorama for the Reference 5. The even vertical dispersion gives them a big advantage in the early reflections and sound power department.
The devialet Phantom Reactor might get there too. Not too far off from the KH80s in terms of linearity and probably better dispersion if my measurements ended up lining up with the klippel.
M8, as you can't associate Q with axial deviations and tilt I believe you can say it was clearly stated that the context was low Q resonances.
But generally, it is true that "deviations" depend a bit on the context a bit. Not a big bit, but still a bit.
Trying to give a value for money "parameter" is pointless IMHO.
The price and availability of different brands varies wildly in different countries. If this forum had only one nationality of readers you could do it, but it doesn't, in fact if you use the majority the price should be in Euros but that would distort the result juat as badly as using US dollars even if it would be more accurate for the majority of members here.
I wouldnt call it pointless, as US readers will appreciate it.
I agree that most readers here are international, including myself, will find it less relevant because of their location.
But it's better than not having it, IMO.
Im not sure if @pozz will be creating a US-only spreadsheet/database or will it it have international prices?
Seeing how large this community is, im sure we can find some international readers to help pozz with international prices.
Totally disagree. IME no data is better than inaccurate data.
OTOH everybody could just ignore it, like I will.
Showing US-prices is inaccurate?
Not following your logic.
It's region specific, so US-readers will appreciate it.
I think showing prices is a great idea. Then we can search the database based on price and budget?
It's not going to vary dramatically, though. You won't find a $10,000 speaker sold at $100 somewhere else. It's good enough (and very useful) for a "big picture" presentation, as long as one doesn't zoom in too much.
Case in point: the data MZKM already posted show the JBL 305 beats everything else in terms of "bang for the buck", which is what anyone would expect, really.
No but typically, for example, US kit costs 50% more in the UK than in the US and vice versa, if you can get it.
Don't you think that likely to skew a single vfm parameter to the extent it is meaningless most of the time? I do.
Anyway if people want to pointlessly over simplify (IMO) complex measurements in this way I don't have to take any notice do I? So it is only of any consequence to people who may believe and make buying decisions on it.
No more comment from me.
Hugo9000
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From my own point of view, there are two main areas of interest involving price.
So some kind of ranking that attempts to combine price and performance can be useful or interesting for discussions, but it's not as directly practical/useful compared to simply being able to sort lists on the raw price itself (for me anyway, YMMV of course!).
I'm not sure how much agreement you could get among people as far as weighting in creating a scoring mechanism for "value." If something is a mediocre performer by all the measurements (getting an average performance score), but costs $20k, it scores a ZERO for me on value. Obviously other people have entirely different standards. And of course, something could get a ZERO on value but still be worthwhile from an aesthetic point of view. Over certain price points, there is no excuse for less than stellar performance for me personally. And obviously everyone is free to use or ignore whatever scoring system is put in place. As long as it's relatively easy to find and sort products by type, brand, and price in addition to whatever scores are generated, I think functionality of the system/site will be pretty well covered.
My thanks to @pozz and @MZKM and anyone else who is helping to make all these tests easy to find and use with their indexing work, and of course to @amirm for the forum and the tests themselves!
(Edited to add: my apologies to @pozz , I missed your post requesting that we put the price discussions on hold for now.)
- As a practical matter when choosing what to audition according to one's spending budget, it would of course be useful to search and sort on a price range, and seeing the speakers in that range ranked by performance factors (and of course being able to easily click through to see the detailed measurements from the full test/review thread).
- The other one would be out of interest in the discussions of price/quality correlations and whether there is any general trend or not. It's not necessarily helpful in purchasing decisions for many people. However, if it is shown that particular brands typically have very good performance and generally reasonable prices, then some might choose that brand over another that is all over the map regarding price and performance. Some of us look for brands that offer consistent performance and consistently good value across their product lines when making our purchasing decisions.
So some kind of ranking that attempts to combine price and performance can be useful or interesting for discussions, but it's not as directly practical/useful compared to simply being able to sort lists on the raw price itself (for me anyway, YMMV of course!).
I'm not sure how much agreement you could get among people as far as weighting in creating a scoring mechanism for "value." If something is a mediocre performer by all the measurements (getting an average performance score), but costs $20k, it scores a ZERO for me on value. Obviously other people have entirely different standards. And of course, something could get a ZERO on value but still be worthwhile from an aesthetic point of view. Over certain price points, there is no excuse for less than stellar performance for me personally. And obviously everyone is free to use or ignore whatever scoring system is put in place. As long as it's relatively easy to find and sort products by type, brand, and price in addition to whatever scores are generated, I think functionality of the system/site will be pretty well covered.
My thanks to @pozz and @MZKM and anyone else who is helping to make all these tests easy to find and use with their indexing work, and of course to @amirm for the forum and the tests themselves!
(Edited to add: my apologies to @pozz , I missed your post requesting that we put the price discussions on hold for now.)
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