While dispersion and response smoothness are of crucial importance, I again want to remind of the importance of other attributes too. Low bass, step response, distortion profile and CSD will tell a lot of how loud and clean the speaker will be. Occasional readers with less experience might also benefit from some kind of categorization of intended usage and spl capacity - eg. desktop/hifi on-stand with subwoofer/hifi floorstander fullrange
By just looking at responses of LSR305 one might think that it's one the best loudspeakers in the world...
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but your last line does bring up a point I've been thinking about for some time: the more I listen to speakers, the more I feel the gap between great expensive speakers and great inexpensive speakers is really way smaller than the magnitude of their price difference. Of course, all of us measurements-liking folks know price isn't an indicator of quality, but it just becomes more obvious in my practical experience all the time.
Having the luxury of reviewing speakers sent by manufacturers and measuring them has to some degree divorced price from my consideration of them during listening tests. This is good and bad.
On the one hand, I think I pretty much ignore price in my listening impressions nowadays. I'm not hoping my multi-thousand dollar puchase was worth it. When you go from testing $12,000 towers to testing $300 speakers+sub the next day and don't feel like it's a big downgrade - if a downgrade at all - it gets harder to justify the extra expense. Of course, I can't completely eliminate my biases, but if I were to rank the speakers I've heard in terms of my memory of them, or divide them into tiers, I don't think there's be much relation to price at all.
So my expectations for expensive speakers have gotten much lower, so much that they vary rarely 'wow' me any more. I definitely tend to be wowed more by cheap and small speakers. On the negative side, I have to remind myself sometimes that "hey, this speaker is expensive and should probably perform better at this price" when doing reviews.
Instead, for me price now comes to play in just a few factors: design, customer service, build quality, versatility. Of course, there are still some acoustic aspects hard to find at a low price, such as smooth response, deep bass, and high SPL levels in a compact body. But that versatility one is important. A big tower speaker that's easy to drive and has high SPL limits will likely sound good in almost any setup. Something like the 305P MKII will be good within limits. Not crazy high SPL, if you can deal with the hiss, and if durability and longevity isn't a priority (who knows how long the components will last). Also if you don't care about looks, because it isn't exactly a looker
But if those things aren't an issue to you.... maybe the LSR305 could be the best speaker in the world =]
Funny thing is for all I love speakers and have dedicated so much time to learning about them and testing them in the past year, nothing comes close to binaural audio through headphones for me in terms of realism and spatial cues. It's a shame more music isn't recorded this way, and that it's not really a shareable experience. I also usually seem to get lucky with the HRTFs - I guess I just have a very average head
Step response found himself in quite an important company here. From what I have learned, once you fix the phase response at LP to be smooth and as close to minimum phase as possible you will pretty much fix everything in time domain: excess phase will be horizintal line with values close to 0, step response would look like a nice triangle and GD graph will look nice and low as well. But I never got to understand if and how getting the phase right at LP really affects SQ.
@KSTR you are a pro, what is your take on this?
My understanding is that for the most part phase shift and group delay (at least above schroeder) and time alignment in general don't affect people's preference all that much. Reflections complicate things a lot. It's probably more important in the nearfield with more direct sound though. Might be correlated with research showing mixing engineers tend to prefer narrow directivity designs and deader rooms too (fewer reflections), at least when doing their jobs. But some people say they're really sensitive to it. I thought I could notice a bit more sharpness when I turned off the phase alignment feature on the KEF LS50W on and off, but I'd need to do a blind test to know whether I actually
preferred that sound.
