Thanks Amir for the quick turnaround! If you have time, I'd love to see the distortion plot as loud as you can get them to play before going into protection 
I put a bit of background of Meyer Sound and put down in writing my first subjective impressions listening to them here: I spent perhaps 2 hours at most in stereo before shipping them to Amir for measurements and spent another hour or so in mono. I did not listen to "Fast Car" on them yet.
www.audiosciencereview.com
1) Sense of smoothness/warmth without any sweetening of the treble or sparkle.
It actually is negative impression at first, but as you listen you hear all the details
2) Sounds like I'm in a bigger room than I really am in
Hard to explain but was how I would describe it as different from the 708P
Later, I added in the thread
3) Vocals are more forward with the JBL 708P in contrast to the Meyer Sound
which I didn't understand, since at least on-axis, both were very flat.
Now that Amir has published the first full set of measurements, I am vindicated that subjective opinion can indeed convey impressions that can later be verified with measurements.
I have a few comments on why my subjective impressions of speaker in larger room may correlate with the measurements.
1) How do you or I hear the difference between speakers in a big and small room, if you've applied room EQ for the bass nodes?
I think subjectively, the reflections off the wall behind the speakers probably play a cue. If the on-axis is relatively flat but there is a shelving effect for the higher frequencies, perhaps the reduced SPL of the reflections arriving slightly later trick the brain into thinking that it's a speaker with normal off-axis roll-off and the reason the reflections have a lower SPL is that walls are further away. We know that phase is something we're less sensitive to than frequency response, so maybe my brain over-rides the "this arrived too quickly for it to be a big room" with the "it's a big room, because the reflections are a lot quieter than the on-axis sound". This was my perception, but to my knowledge, this might be the first speaker we've seen with an intentional shelving effect in its design.
2) Dr. Toole and Olive and lateral reflections
The argument for a wide directivity and smooth directivity index is that if the two are different, you cannot EQ the sound since correction of one affects the other. This is a large part of the "preference score" which is based around music and mono listening and developed and validated for 2 channel listening. Most people will be best served by a speaker with a high preference score most of the time.
While they were still in Canada, they also published papers on the detection of reflections in typical rooms. There they mentioned that your threshold of detection of lateral reflections
They noted that "The principal side effects betraying the presence of the low-level reflection were a slight sense of spaciousness and occasional high-frequency sibilant "splashes" localized at the origin of the lateral reflection."
Spaciousness is really the perceived WIDTH of the source and not the sense of hearing something in a larger room.
For movie imaging, you wouldn't want to shift the apparent position.
I'd love to get @Floyd Toole 's opinion about this shelving potentially contributing to my perception that this speaker sounds different than I would expect. Is this a trade off between movies/music and LCR setups vs 2ch?
To my understanding, these speakers are largely built-to-order so discounts are rare. There’s wiggle room when you are buying in bulk like the real studios but I did get these as a single “demo” and single new speaker, so I was able to get a discount off retail. You might also get lucky if someone orders it and then backs out even if they never opened it. Like everything, they have gone up in price with inflation.
What is unique about Meyer Sound besides the brand, is that they are built to a whole different level than many other active speakers. They have internal surge suppression for example. Yes, it's pretty cheap to buy a surge protector -- but it's that type of engineering that you're paying for.
I do own the 708P’s (which are on sale right now at a steal right here on ASR Buy/Sell!) so at least for me, it’s an upgrade, not a lateral move — but it’s not so straightforward of an answer because you’re right, it is a lot of money, some of which is due to location of manufacture, some of which is paying for the brand name, and some of which is pre-paying for superb customer support — none which affect the sound quality.
The difference in sound between the 708P and Amie is night and day. I don’t know that you could prove that one is better, but you can easily prove that they sound different. I think the fact that Meyer Sound, themselves, suggest that this isn't intended to just reproduce what is on the recording but instead simulate the larger Acheron speakers while being "as close to sonically transparent as possible" is there. Meyer Sound has talked about maintaining cinema levels at 2m and most other 6.5" designs only hitting those SPLs at 1m.
It is said by one big JBL retailer that “80% of Blu-ray / UHD Blu-ray / Digital mixes, and roughly half of all high-end music recordings are mastered on JBL Pro or JBL Synthesis systems.” There’s no citation for that claim. At the same time, a lot of the movie screening rooms and dubbing stages are moving away from JBL to Meyer Sound. Director’s Guild of America, NBC Universal Hitchcock Theater, Fox Newman Scoring Stage, Skywalker Sound, etc.
The Director’s Guild of America had a committee which included Chris Nolan, Jon Favreau, Michael Mann work with Dolby to come up with a few different proposals from different vendors. JBL and Meyer Sound were the finalists. They had the companies, along with Dolby, setup the speakers in the theater, allowed them to be tune by the manufacturer’s representatives for peak performance and evaluated a broad range of licensed soundtrack excerpts to evaluate dialogue clarity, effects impact, and musicality and went with Meyer Sound. I would have imagined that efforts were taken to make this a fair comparison to minimize sighted bias.
As far as I know, it seems like Sean Olive focuses primarily on headphones now. Floyd Toole has retired. Charles Sprinkle (behind the M2/7/HDI horn) left to start Kali. Doug Button is with Sonos. Harman had Logic7. Harman had Sound Field Management. Now they rely on their industry partners. We do know that the SDP-75 has a "new" Harman target curve, but under the current Samsung management, less is being published.
Meyer Sound is very measurement and engineering focused and they aren't going for the same preference score as Harman's research, though they have approached the problem from two different avenues. One being multiple speaker arrays for touring artists and multichannel cinema and the other being consumer 2ch home audio and headphones.
Agree that the KH150 is the speaker to beat overall. The three questions
1) Does the shelving of the off-axis response have specific benefits when used in multichannel applications?
2) Considering the circle of confusion, how much do you gain from using the same speakers that Skywalker Sound uses in its dubbing stages when you're not in the same room, but may have similar reflective surfaces?
3) Knowing what Dr. Toole wrote about shifting localization/spaciousness and reflections (and therefore off-axis response) -- how does this factor in the preference score when it seems that the goals of 2ch are different than that of movies?
I put a bit of background of Meyer Sound and put down in writing my first subjective impressions listening to them here: I spent perhaps 2 hours at most in stereo before shipping them to Amir for measurements and spent another hour or so in mono. I did not listen to "Fast Car" on them yet.
Meyer Sound Amie: First Impressions
Yes, these are already en route to @amirm for a formal spin on the Klippel NFS. $8160/pair MSRP (Sept 2023) Manufacturer's Website Specifications Frequency Response 45 Hz – 20 kHz ± 4 dB Phase Response 190 Hz – 20 kHz ± 45° Linear Peak SPL 120.5 dB with 18.5 dB crest factor (M-noise)...
www.audiosciencereview.com
1) Sense of smoothness/warmth without any sweetening of the treble or sparkle.
It actually is negative impression at first, but as you listen you hear all the details
2) Sounds like I'm in a bigger room than I really am in
Hard to explain but was how I would describe it as different from the 708P
Later, I added in the thread
3) Vocals are more forward with the JBL 708P in contrast to the Meyer Sound
which I didn't understand, since at least on-axis, both were very flat.
Now that Amir has published the first full set of measurements, I am vindicated that subjective opinion can indeed convey impressions that can later be verified with measurements.
I have a few comments on why my subjective impressions of speaker in larger room may correlate with the measurements.
1) How do you or I hear the difference between speakers in a big and small room, if you've applied room EQ for the bass nodes?
I think subjectively, the reflections off the wall behind the speakers probably play a cue. If the on-axis is relatively flat but there is a shelving effect for the higher frequencies, perhaps the reduced SPL of the reflections arriving slightly later trick the brain into thinking that it's a speaker with normal off-axis roll-off and the reason the reflections have a lower SPL is that walls are further away. We know that phase is something we're less sensitive to than frequency response, so maybe my brain over-rides the "this arrived too quickly for it to be a big room" with the "it's a big room, because the reflections are a lot quieter than the on-axis sound". This was my perception, but to my knowledge, this might be the first speaker we've seen with an intentional shelving effect in its design.
2) Dr. Toole and Olive and lateral reflections
The argument for a wide directivity and smooth directivity index is that if the two are different, you cannot EQ the sound since correction of one affects the other. This is a large part of the "preference score" which is based around music and mono listening and developed and validated for 2 channel listening. Most people will be best served by a speaker with a high preference score most of the time.
While they were still in Canada, they also published papers on the detection of reflections in typical rooms. There they mentioned that your threshold of detection of lateral reflections
They noted that "The principal side effects betraying the presence of the low-level reflection were a slight sense of spaciousness and occasional high-frequency sibilant "splashes" localized at the origin of the lateral reflection."
Spaciousness is really the perceived WIDTH of the source and not the sense of hearing something in a larger room.
For movie imaging, you wouldn't want to shift the apparent position.
I'd love to get @Floyd Toole 's opinion about this shelving potentially contributing to my perception that this speaker sounds different than I would expect. Is this a trade off between movies/music and LCR setups vs 2ch?
To my understanding, these speakers are largely built-to-order so discounts are rare. There’s wiggle room when you are buying in bulk like the real studios but I did get these as a single “demo” and single new speaker, so I was able to get a discount off retail. You might also get lucky if someone orders it and then backs out even if they never opened it. Like everything, they have gone up in price with inflation.
What is unique about Meyer Sound besides the brand, is that they are built to a whole different level than many other active speakers. They have internal surge suppression for example. Yes, it's pretty cheap to buy a surge protector -- but it's that type of engineering that you're paying for.
I do own the 708P’s (which are on sale right now at a steal right here on ASR Buy/Sell!) so at least for me, it’s an upgrade, not a lateral move — but it’s not so straightforward of an answer because you’re right, it is a lot of money, some of which is due to location of manufacture, some of which is paying for the brand name, and some of which is pre-paying for superb customer support — none which affect the sound quality.
The difference in sound between the 708P and Amie is night and day. I don’t know that you could prove that one is better, but you can easily prove that they sound different. I think the fact that Meyer Sound, themselves, suggest that this isn't intended to just reproduce what is on the recording but instead simulate the larger Acheron speakers while being "as close to sonically transparent as possible" is there. Meyer Sound has talked about maintaining cinema levels at 2m and most other 6.5" designs only hitting those SPLs at 1m.
It is said by one big JBL retailer that “80% of Blu-ray / UHD Blu-ray / Digital mixes, and roughly half of all high-end music recordings are mastered on JBL Pro or JBL Synthesis systems.” There’s no citation for that claim. At the same time, a lot of the movie screening rooms and dubbing stages are moving away from JBL to Meyer Sound. Director’s Guild of America, NBC Universal Hitchcock Theater, Fox Newman Scoring Stage, Skywalker Sound, etc.
The Director’s Guild of America had a committee which included Chris Nolan, Jon Favreau, Michael Mann work with Dolby to come up with a few different proposals from different vendors. JBL and Meyer Sound were the finalists. They had the companies, along with Dolby, setup the speakers in the theater, allowed them to be tune by the manufacturer’s representatives for peak performance and evaluated a broad range of licensed soundtrack excerpts to evaluate dialogue clarity, effects impact, and musicality and went with Meyer Sound. I would have imagined that efforts were taken to make this a fair comparison to minimize sighted bias.
As far as I know, it seems like Sean Olive focuses primarily on headphones now. Floyd Toole has retired. Charles Sprinkle (behind the M2/7/HDI horn) left to start Kali. Doug Button is with Sonos. Harman had Logic7. Harman had Sound Field Management. Now they rely on their industry partners. We do know that the SDP-75 has a "new" Harman target curve, but under the current Samsung management, less is being published.
Meyer Sound is very measurement and engineering focused and they aren't going for the same preference score as Harman's research, though they have approached the problem from two different avenues. One being multiple speaker arrays for touring artists and multichannel cinema and the other being consumer 2ch home audio and headphones.
Agree that the KH150 is the speaker to beat overall. The three questions
1) Does the shelving of the off-axis response have specific benefits when used in multichannel applications?
2) Considering the circle of confusion, how much do you gain from using the same speakers that Skywalker Sound uses in its dubbing stages when you're not in the same room, but may have similar reflective surfaces?
3) Knowing what Dr. Toole wrote about shifting localization/spaciousness and reflections (and therefore off-axis response) -- how does this factor in the preference score when it seems that the goals of 2ch are different than that of movies?
