This is always going to seem to be a paradox when you compare apples to oranges (sub score vs no sub score), because the reality is speaker preference is a multi-dimensional quantity (e.g. bass extension, bass quality, mids quality, treble quality, spatial quality -- or something like that) being boiled down into a one-dimensional quantity here for the sake of generating a single final score.Yes, but if I add a sub to the 305 it can play loud enough, and does it really become as satisfying as the little Genelec alone? Does the sub really turn a mid-4 into a high 6? I think it might but only with plenty of caveats and comparing more apples rather than apples and oranges.
There are many good reasons to do this: It allows items to be straightforwardly sorted (which is very convenient), it allows one winner out of any two speakers to be chosen objectively, etc. But it will always cause confusion about ranking when we poke into specific details that betray the fact that the true space being modeled here is in fact multidimensional. Humans definitely can perceive different qualities of a speaker separately (even if not separated perfectly crisply or without error). To illustrate this, consider the fact that we sometimes (1) struggle to choose a favorite among a set of two speakers (e.g. when each have different strengths and weaknesses), and (2) those two speakers are very audibly different from one another. Together, these two points can form a logical (informal) proof that the perception going on here is at least fractionally more than 1-dimensional.
The solution to that confusion is to realize that when we project multidimensional points into 1D space, two resulting values that are similar or the same does not always mean that the corresponding original N-dimensional points are the same.
To put it into speaker preference terms, it means this: If two speakers score 5.0 exactly, it does not mean both those speakers will sound the same. They each could have completely different strengths and weaknesses, which when weighted and combined result in the same overall preference score. And if that preference score is good enough, maybe you'll even find yourself unable to choose a winning speaker; imagine a situation where one speaker has incredible treble but annoying bass issues, and another has incredible bass but annoying treble issues. Which speaker do you choose? Maybe they're in some sense "equal" overall, even though each speaker is fundamentally different from the other in this example.
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