Have you heard a Magico or other high end speaker?
What I heard is irrelevant. We're discussing data and research here, not personal anecdotes. Now, if you were to provide results of double-blind comparisons including that speaker,
that would be relevant. Such studies are expensive to conduct however, so you're unlikely to find one. So instead, I'd be happy to review measurements, which we know (from studies I've already mentioned) agree well with the results of double-blind studies. More on this below.
Speakers are for music lovers not for reproducing tones from 20hz to 20Khz. People hear music not tones.
This is a common misconception. Some (not all) measurements are done using pure tones, but we know how the results of these measurements will affect the response of the speaker when playing actual music, because a loudspeaker is a mostly linear device and therefore follows the
Superposition principle. As to the non-linear behaviour, well, that can be measured too, and in any case it has been shown not to matter much with typical loudspeakers (as I explained in my previous post).
It has often been found that the ones that measure well do not really sound good.
The exact opposite has been demonstrated in many serious, rigorous double-blind studies with robust statistical analysis. Listeners consistently prefer speakers that measure better. The study I linked in my previous post is one such study, but there are many others (most of them are listed in
this book). If you've heard otherwise, then maybe your sources lacked such rigour. (In particular, maybe they weren't done blind, which would be a
big problem indeed.)
let's start using music to measure how good speakers perform. The only reason we use tones is because it's easier. There's no free lunch
Yes, that's the idea. We don't have to "start" using music to measure speakers - researchers have done that for a very long time, that's called a double-blind test. If you search AES archives you will find plenty of double-blind speaker tests involving music, going back decades.
So why don't we just do that then? Well, the problem is, well-conducted blind speaker tests are extremely expensive and time-consuming. It's not realistic to expect every speaker on the market to come with a double-blind study comparing it to its competitors (even just measurement data, which is much easier to produce, is often hard to find).
So what's the next best thing? Well, we can try doing objective acoustic measurements of the speaker, and then see if we can correlate some of these measurements with the outcomes of double blind tests. This way, instead of doing an expensive double-blind test, we can simply measure the speaker and then deduce how well it's going to sound to the average listener without having to actually listen to it. Guess what: this is exactly what Toole, Olive, and others have done other the past decades, and the results are clear: what matters most, by far, is on-axis frequency response, closely followed by off-axis frequency response. If you have this data, you can predict how the speaker would be rated in an actual double-blind test with a high degree of accuracy.
I would never want to buy something as cheap as the LSR305. I will try to hear these someday but like all the others they'll probably sound bad.
If you enter this experiment with a mindset like that, it's likely you will not like them, because our perception of audio quality is
extremely prone to bias and prejudices. You can avoid these biases by doing a blind test, but again, blind tests involving speakers are hard to do correctly. Or you could simply trust the research, which did involve blind tests, real people, and real music. That research is telling you that, based on its measurements, the LSR305 does sound good, at least as far as the typical listener is concerned.
If you truly want to learn, then go
read this book. It answers the questions you have in an excruciating amount of detail, and is backed by literally pages of references to peer-reviewed scientific studies. It's a much better use of your time than rehashing old arguments on some Internet forum.
