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Re: A More Realistic Presentation...

Thanks for bringing up these points. It illustrates two opposite points of view.

"Sure we expect a speaker designer to more than merely just throw together parts but isn't there alot more to do with loudspeaker design than simply dealing with room reflection?"

I didn't mean to imply that reflections are the only element which should be considered, but is it a major element. They are the ONLY reason why a speaker sounds different in one room than another or different between one spot in the same room and another.

"Aren't speakers often measured and evaluated in rooms where reflections/interactions are minimized and if not aren't room effects accounted for in such measurements and or descriptions?"

There is no standard way to measure a loudspeaker. That's not just my opinion, it's a statement of fact in Sam's Audio Engineer's Handbook. The room which has no reflections at all is the anechoic chamber where many speakers are measured by the designer. Nobody except an engineer in a factory will listen to music in one. This can account for the reason why the measurements are poor predictors of how a speaker will sound in a real room. Without a much more complete set of measurements such as polar response at all frequencies in all planes, there is no way to predict.

"Doesn't an assumption on the part of a component designer have as much chance of being beneficial as it does a liability?"

No, Murphy's Law was discovered by engineers who learned early on the hard way that things left to random chance and are unplanned for usually don't work out for the best. Most surprises are unpleasant ones. That is what engineering is actually all about, anticipating the variables of use, the desired outcome, and making it possible for a product to achieve that outcome by adapting it.

"It's still a crap shoot which speaker is going to be favored by most in any given situation - whether the speaker was designed in an ideal room (no considerations on room effects) or was designed to a specific room configuration. The responsibility for loudspeaker selection is up to the end user."

And that is precisely the problem. There is no such thing as an ideal room and no two rooms are exactly alike. Engineering means anticipating the conditions a product is likely to be used under and making provisions to for the user to adapt the product to them for the greatest variety of them so that the results are predictable and consistant within the narrowest possible range. Were an automobile not engineered this way, it might not have headlights if the engineer didn't anticipate that it might be used at night. When the responsibility is left to the user, the designer expects the user to be a better engineer than he is and to effectively re-engineer the product in the field or to live with whatever the consequences of his limitations are.

"It seems unreasonable to me that one should consider one speaker design preferential to another based on how much the design attempts to compensate for room effects - until the speakers being considered are heard in any particular room."

Does it seem unreasonable that a television set should have brightness and contrast controls to adapt to different ambient lighting levels in a room also? It shouldn't seem unreasonable to expect this adaptability to be incorporated into the design but may seem unfamiliar because most designers don't provide it.

"Of course which speaker works best in which room may or may not reflect the success of the designs room compensation effects."

Most speakers have no adjustment built in at all. A speaker which has to be moved 1/4 inch at a time around a room in order to find out its least worst location and orientation has IMO been very badly engineered. Yes the state of the art is still very primitive.

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