Analytical or Musical Which way to go?

05-22-12: Gregadd
>The advent of large corporations put us in difficult position. Who are the arbiters of what we hear and the standard by which we judge it? When the baby-boomers die off what will the standard be?

Without any hearing defects the baby boomers and generation Y share the same tastes in speakers : flat on-axis response, a monotonic directivity trend, and extended bass regardless of age and preferred musical genre.

For example:

http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2010/06/some-new-evidence-that-generation-y.html

Moving forward we can expect more speakers built to this standard because it's what people want to buy and something that can be targeted by engineering departments - Dr. Sean Olive has distilled this into a formula which ranks speakers based on polar measurements in horizontal and vertical circles which corresponds very well to blind objective comparisons.

Gregadd, funny that you mentioned John Atkinson's article because I was about to mention it when you asked whether measurements can predict colorations. What I was going to mention was in Part 3 of the article, though. Some of his conclusions:

"What Makes a Good-Sounding Loudspeaker?

"Vance Dickason offers some discussion of this question, but the definitive answers are to be found in Floyd Toole's comprehensive 1986 papers. Nothing that I can conclude from my past eight years' work, at least when it comes to conventional forward-firing, moving-coil designs, is in serious conflict with his findings. As I wrote in 1991, 'The best-sounding loudspeakers, in my opinion, combine a flat on-axis midrange and treble with an absence of resonant colorations, a well-controlled high-frequency dispersion, excellent imaging precision, an optimally tuned bass, and also play loud and clean without obtrusive compression'."

And

"Most important, while measurements can tell you how a loudspeaker sounds, they can't tell you how good it is. If you carefully look at a complete set of measurements, you can actually work out a reasonably accurate prediction of how a loudspeaker will sound. However, the measured performance will not tell you if it's a good speaker or a great speaker, or if it's a good speaker or a rather boring-sounding speaker. To assess quality, the educated ear is still the only reliable judge."

http://www.stereophile.com/content/measuring-loudspeakers-part-three-page-9

A neutral speaker should not sound neutral. I would not want to be in the position of arguing that speakers that don't measure well are preferable. As Atmassphere pointed out, if a speker sounds good but measures poorly you are measuring the wrong thing.
I am a criminal defese attorney . When DNA testing first appeared I was against it because the sample size was way to small to apply it to the general population. That of course has changed.
Dr. Olive concedes that the results of his test (sample size)is too small to extrapolate it to the general population. Morever saying young people and audiophiles have the same preferences is not only wrong IMO but is not supported by any evidence that I am aware of it. The majority of those who heard speaker that measured well seemed to prefer them over speakers that measured less well. The good news is that as far as I know the test are ongoing. It is likely one day he will have a large enough sample with a proper demographic. Testing students on a high school field trip is hardly a scientific sample.

Drew Echardt- I heard the Orion at RMAF 2010. I liked them and found them to be very smooth.

"While the small sample size of listeners does notallow us to make generalizations to larger populations, nonetheless it is reassuring to find that both the American and Japanese students, regardless of their critical listening experience, recognized good sound when they heard it, and preferred it to the lower quality options. "

Dr Sean Olive

How can you debate 'taste' preferences? It does make for a lively discussion, but as I first heard from my Dad...'There is no accounting for tastes'. But again, it does make for a fun discussion.