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Should audiophiles be disappointed?...

I have read several reports on CES '04 and it seems to me many speakers were dependent on room treatments to realize their potential. Am I in the minority... if I'm going to pay $10-25K for a pair of speakers I would expect the design and execution of those speakers to sound outstanding in any environment and without costly room treatments to enhance their performance! Not too mention the fact if I'm laying out that kind of money I would expect the speakers to play all types of music with equal aplomb, which is not the case in some designs. I understand nearfield concepts, defraction and other room environmental conditions, but come on. If I was a speaker designer my goal would be to create a design that would sound superb right out of the box (& get better with time) and require very little set-up and tweaking.

It's discouraging to me to hear the variation in sound based on set-ups for so many of the speakers showing at CES. Maybe I expect too much, or perhaps the audiophiles of this world are expecting too little. Good speakers should sound good anywhere?
128x128dawgbyte
uppermidfi
277 posts
 
If Rives has posted this will probably be redundant, but it doesn't matter how good a speaker is, if the room is bad the speakers will sound bad!

It is simple physics. Room dimensions, volume, and materials have profound effects on the speakers ability to reproduce a signal accurately. The room will exaggerate some frequencies and minimize others. No speaker can compensate for those issues. A speaker can't even be designed to compensate since virtually every room is different.
macrojack
1,303 posts
 
Check out the B&O Beolab 5. It seems to deal with the problem nicely.
john_z
178 posts
 
Rives makes a very valid point regarding "the better the speaker".. Regarding passive designs, I think in general the tighter the tolerances on driver matching, crossover tuning, and all the many design elements in a speaker design the more revealing they will likely be to changes in the environment they are placed in.

Logically, if the characteristics of the speaker are fixed, then they will not sound the same under different acoustic environments. By contrast, active speakers that can adapt to their environment by utilizing EQ, DSP, etc. (like Meridian's active DSP models, for example), can compensate quite a bit for less-than-ideal placement or acoustics up to a point.

In the reference manual that came with my Hales Revelation Two's, (a very nice speaker if do say so myself!), there is a very in-depth chapter on finding the best placement in your room and the importance of room acoustics. At the end of the chapter, Paul Hales candidly writes: "as awesome as your Hales loudspeakers are, they will sound bad in a bad room". He obviously has no illusions about the importance of the environment affecting sound quality!
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