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FAO the pro-measurement crowd: ASR to start measuring speaker performance

Ability to reproduce a square wave always seems a measurement never used these days....probably because few modern speakers can make a decent stab at it. Of the golden oldies Quad ESLs and Ureis could apparently manage the trick....so a definite correlation with quality.
 
ff1d1l said:
Ability to reproduce a square wave always seems a measurement never used these days....probably because few modern speakers can make a decent stab at it. Of the golden oldies Quad ESLs and Ureis could apparently manage the trick....so a definite correlation with quality.
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And my Eminent Technology 8Bs!
 
Many readers will fail to realize that a flat anechoic response is nothing like ideal in a real room.

A good impedance measurement is a big clue to how speakers sound, showing high Q ports and cabinet resonances
 
I don't get the histerical hatred toward ASR that I see sometimes on this forum.

Amir has excellent equipment, does industry standard measurements, has technical expertise to do it well and he isn't paid by equipment manufacturers.

There is a seemingly perverse expectation that expensive audiophile approved equipment SHOULD measure badly. Owners appear proud that their equipment produces a lot of distortion - the more cred a megabuck component has the more distortion it should produce! That's crazy.

I expect my equipment to sound good and measure well. So a resource like ASR, which can alert you to how well an equipment designer actually knows electronic engineering is a very worthy addition.

Surely, equipment's sound is not fully defined by simple measurements. However, low noise, low harmonic and intermodulation distortion and high dynamic range are required for high fidelity sound reproduction. ASR can often provide a standard set of measurements that many manufacturers do not publish. One can decide that subjective performance outweigh technical flaws, but at least one has the information.
 
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mjwolf said:
Or someone willing to make a significant outlay of time and money to provide for free what some consider to be a very useful service. IMO he should be applauded.
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Absolutely. But the High Priest/Acolyte model is not always a great look. A good balance to the sneery subjectivists over on SBAF though.
 
Alex S said:
Absolutely. But the High Priest/Acolyte model is not always a great look. A good balance to the sneery subjectivists over on SBAF though.
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Agreed. I don't participate there partly because of that. Amir himself seems very polite and patient.

The measurements themselves are fine.
 
mjwolf said:
A very interesting development IMO:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ncement-asr-will-be-measuring-speakers.10725/
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It seems to me that equipment measurements appear to divide people who don't have experience of making and interpreting measurements (and most people naturally don't). A typical response is to generalize and polarise to either "measurements mean nothing" or "measurements mean everything."

In reality measurements mean something - usually something useful. But you do have to be prepared to work out exactly what that is rather than just generalize.
 
John Phillips said:
It seems to me that equipment measurements appear to divide people who don't have experience of making and interpreting measurements (and most people naturally don't). A typical response is to generalize and polarise to either "measurements mean nothing" or "measurements mean everything."

In reality measurements mean something - usually something useful. But you do have to be prepared to work out exactly what that is rather than just generalize.
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I am very much in the "measurements tell you everything" camp; after all, our ears work by measuring air pressure fluctuations, and they are not all that good at it in absolute terms.

For something like a DAC, measurements are relatively easy to interpret, mainly because the technology has been more or less perfected, for all practical (audio) purposes.

For speakers, which still represent much more of a compromise, interpretation/understanding will be a lot more important. One of the best things about the fact that ASR are going to start looking at speakers is the huge opportunity that it will provide for novices like me to learn.
 
Alex S said:
Absolutely. But the High Priest/Acolyte model is not always a great look. A good balance to the sneery subjectivists over on SBAF though.
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I'm not a member of SBAF (yet) but actually find it a pretty useful resource for headphone frequency response, CSD and distortion measurements.
 
John Phillips said:
It seems to me that equipment measurements appear to divide people who don't have experience of making and interpreting measurements (and most people naturally don't). A typical response is to generalize and polarise to either "measurements mean nothing" or "measurements mean everything."

In reality measurements mean something - usually something useful. But you do have to be prepared to work out exactly what that is rather than just generalize.
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Quite right. It is not the measurements as such but the way people use and misuse them, particularly salesmen. In the case of speakers they show the speakers potential, but it is only when they are used in any particular room that we can tell whether or not they are any good for us as individuals, and of course some people want to analyse recordings and others to create a convincing illusion of the original sound.
 
I really like what ASR has been doing with measurements of electronics, but I'm dubious that getting into measuring speakers is worthwhile.

It's obviously a big investment in money and time for a start, and there are SO many speakers out there, it's hard to see how he can measure enough products to make the reviews relevant to most peoples' purchasing decision. Furthermore, if you take a speaker with "good measurements" (whatever that means as there are a lot of parameters to look at) and plonk it in a normal room, the room response can easily dominate, and the overall result becomes "bad".

I'll be interested to see how it goes, but I doubt it'll have the same impact that the site has had on the DAC and headphone amp market.
 
This is good news, although I hope that whoever does the listening tests does so before being informed of the measurements, in order to remove any expectation bias.
 
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