it seems you are not interested in real understanding or discussion but rather spew out your irony like many audiophiles do here as their favourite devices
I just don't want to be the kind of "anti-audiophile" who is so "anti" that he becomes a graph-freak who ignores everything else. To me this is only slightly better (if better at all) than those who deny the importance of measurements, tune speakers by ear, and prefer to burn in cables and choose the wood material for the stands for these cables, claiming that this is no less important than the choice of speakers themselves.
You seem to dislike the curve
After playing a lot with it on different headphones, I ended up rather enjoying good yet not perfect ones with no EQ involved at all. I do hear some flaws but they rather seem natural to my ears. EQing to Harman curve seems not. I however do have a pair of chinese IEMs which are very close w/o any EQ and yes the overall tune is okay but that doen not make me like their sound much. Again, no complains by the tuning, but nothing exciting as well. Just... bland sound. For my current daily driver 6xx I found "Optimum Hi-Fi curve" to be somewhat balanced, opposite to "mass-market-bassy" sound which Harman tends to produce (and yes I did try adjusting bass level). Yet still prefer it pure with all flaws. There's some concept in it as is.
Regarding the book:
- I haven't read it in its entirety, it's not in the public domain
- I'm familiar with its main theses. Regarding the evaluation of the speakers, the information is public due to the fact that it was discussed almost everywhere and more than once and I refreshed my memory (at the same time remembering why I can't help but perceive it without a sober share of skepticism), this is the same testing of one speaker in mono behind a curtain with an indefinite set of music tracks "of all genres"
- The name and idea itself is to identify the "PREFERRED character of sound", not the "maximum accurate transmission of the phonogram"
- This comparison lacks a reference as such, it is focused on identifying preferences among what you have in fron of you (the least flawed among flawed)
- The result, however, well, not much surprises here: linear speakers without big surprises in dispersion pattern at least within +-15 degrees (the listening window, known and obtained long before the spinorama-on-Klippel) are preferred
That said, I have no complains at all looking at that research from that point: it was partially made for an audio company and partially used as a part of marketing strategy. "Hey, we've found that sound what most of the people prefer". Well, BBC tune with BBC dip (TM) is a earlier approach and a lot of people like it as well.
So, a mass-preferrable tune is what have been found.
Let's accept this as a fact. Then there are two ways:
1) start fussing around it and pointing at everything that is different and calling it bad,
sometimes ecstatically shaking if that's an expensive device
2) take the results into account and in your assessment of the speakers' performance say that from such a point they are imperfect, but in fact this has a strong effect, some effect or no effect at all on subjective listening.
The latter is what I appreciate.
P.S. Also wondering how mono listening of MBL or even MartinLogan static panels can give listener an idea of how it works in real room as a pair.