Thank you for the kind and interesting responses. I will just answer the questions before they pile up.
Thanks Stoneeh for the measurements, as good as can be had (and better than expected, puts Sterophile meas to shame!) without a Klippel.
It's amazing what a simple concrete strip, ~1000€ worth of measurement hardware, and a couple of thousands of hours of experience can do.
Shoutouts to ARTA too, and also Dr. Weber who wrote the amazing
ARTA tutorial from which I learned quite a bit. And Mark Gander for coming up with the GPM method to begin with.
Now, getting to the most important issue -- in the vid, the orange ring looks more red in natural lighting. Is that accurate?
Haha. Well actually, I think that's more the phone's image processing algorithms.. but if I put the speaker outside again I can pay special attention next time.
You are usually involved in building your own speakers. What made you decide to buy the Orbit 11?
Curiosity? Need?
As I wrote in another thread, I wouldn't trust myself to build this speaker for the same price you can buy it ready-made.
Curiosity. I actually asked Palmer for a unit via FB immediately after the announcement, and they never even read my message. So I had to buy one. I will be sending this one back, not because I dislike it, but because I am 100% satisfied with my current speaker system.
Yes, this level of performance at this price is what I'd expect of a company with huge ressources, both in brainpower as well as equipment, benefitting from economy of scale. Well done.
Did you use the manufacturer's THD (at 96dB spl) to compare with other speakers? The spike at 2.5kHz seems to be absent in your measurement.
I'm glad there's people observant enough to notice. Yes. I used the 94 dB manufacturer measurement and scaled it up slightly to represent 96 dB. Reason being that the result is very similar, and ARTA doesn't display THD, so I'd have to extract and manually add up the harmonics.. too much work, too little time. And that spike is probably just some type of glitch that should be ignored.
I love your setup! Lovely place. Is there a reason you did no flatten out the "walls" at the sides? I would be afraid it creates some reflections, but probably the effect is small.
It's an old family property, very remote, ~1km from the nearest house of the next village. You need a place that's 1. free field (no large obstacles in the vicinity) 2. quiet (low ambient noise) 3. remote (no meaningful noise pollution to residents) for these types of measurements. I live 5, 10 minutes drive from there. I park my car ~15m from the concrete strip, and use an Ective SI 30 12 -> 230V converter that's installed in my trunk as power supply. Ah yes, and the view is magnificent too, I agree
I paid closer attention to having no dirt "walls" at the edges of the strip earlier, then at some point saw they make no difference, so I just pile them up. This is the soil that is used to cover the concrete strip when I'm not using it.
why in your opinion AES inputs didn't work ? Did you ask Palmer about tis ?
As I stated in the video, S/PDIF was used, which according to the Palmer rep should have worked (
source):
Orbit 11 will handle your SPDIF signal as well. Only issue could be too little output from your SPDIF Source.
Actually I did get a signal, only it was very weird in that the Orbit then had a skewed frequency response, in that it had a high frequency rolloff. Dunno what that was about. Since that made the speaker unuseable, I declared the AES/EBU via S/PDIF connection attempt a failure.
Excellent test and excellent results for this speaker. 
