Interesting thread. Meaningful measurements are cheap and easy to get these days compared to earlier times but you won't get meaningful measurements if you don't make the effort to understand what the measurements represent and how to vary the gating, averaging, signal, etc... in order to measure what you want to know. In order to have a precise set of things you want to know (rather than the currently vague graphs of something or other that might be vaguely related to what one might hear) you first need to understand a bit about how speakers radiate sound, how speakers interact with the room and how we perceive sound.My conclusions:
- Overall I think It's quite hard to get meaningful measurements and they can be tricky to interpret.
- REW is very impressive, especially for the asking price!
- The ear is the final arbiter.
When I first took in an interest in home audio in the early 70s the majority of hi-fi enthusiasts seemed to have this interest in "why" but it all but disappeared with the rapid growth of the audiophile thing in the late 70s that promoted a belief in magic (both wizardly and witcherly). Now the audiophile thing doesn't seem to have quite such a strong hold as it did perhaps 10 years ago it will be interesting to see if typical posters here start to take more of an interest in "why" rather than "what" and, for example, chip away at the gating, microphone positioning, averaging,... until you do come up with a more meaningful set of measurements to represent what the LS50 is doing in your room.