I agree with you on this. I have a friend who set up a home studio, he uses Yamaha HS8 in the studio, but in the living room has some hifi speakers "to enjoy music". I'm like bro, if your music doesn't sound good fix the software, not the hardware.
It all adds to the circle of confusion.
Audio’s “Circle of Confusion” is a term coined by Floyd Toole [1] that describes the confusion that exists within the audio recording and r...
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I recently got Audio Frist Fidela, which are arguably pretty accurate
https://www.spinorama.org/speakers/Audio First Design Fidelia/ErinsAudioCorner/index_eac.html
If any of this studio monitor / hifi divide were true, my ears should be bleeding because of the "accuracy". Instead I find that I can enjoy even more music than before, because the speakers are simply very good. I know I write this into a lot of threads lately that "I recently got Audio Frist Fidela", but first I'm over the moon with these things. It was an improvement that I not thought possible, and it's not like what I had before was bad in any way. And second, when I say something I want people to be able to relate/compare to where I'm coming from. Having the spinorama data available makes my reference easily understandable.
You write:
A smooth, downward-sloping frequency response at the listening position. Yes, even in the studio.
I also recently built my own tone controls using free of charge tools:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-the-pc-using-drc-fir-eqapo-and-python.62000/
And with these speakers I was torn between not using DRC at all because I thought often it with was worse with DRC. In the end I settled at having just 0.5dB/oct downward slope starting at 2khz and a very short frequency dependend window (250ms at 20hz). This puts 20khz down just by 1.66dB. But it makes a big positive difference in the sound, especially in the midrange. I don't know why but with these speakers I can take loads of high frequency and it doesn't sound harsh. I never had a speaker before that could do that. I have measurements from the same listening position before and after, they look pretty similar pre DRC, but these sound so much better.
Studio speakers and rooms are tools to craft a specific result. They are designed so that it becomes easier to achieve that.
Living rooms are for recreation and enjoyment.
Rooms have a considerable impact on the sound and studio acoustics are quite different from typical living room acoustics.
Does a living room loudspeaker have to be different to create the same ‘sound impression’ for the listener?
I think this is an interesting question. I sit in the nearfield and thus even with DRC, I have an almost flat curve at the listening position. Since I can change target slopes with the push of a button, I can easily compare and while I used lots of downward slope in the past because of harsh highs, now it seems unnecessary dull to me most of the times if I do that.
Naturally somebody who sits 3m away (10 feet in freedom units) in a living room will most likely experience way less high frequency energy, because of reflections playing more of a role and also air as medium will absorb some volume the shorter the wavelength is. Now you could argue, hey let's equalize our living room speakers with a rising frequency response to compensate for that. I don't think that's a good idea, but it could explain the discussions about house curves / target curves and wheter or not to equalize above Schröder.