The problem of measurement distance is well understood by those educated in the art. In other words, the measurers do not think that their 50" or 80" measurements present an accurate performance picture of a multi-driver phase coherent speaker. But their limitations are real. Reflections in real rooms overwhelm the actual signal, so they must bracket the time window of their quasi anechoic measurements to eliminate the reflection - noise. And they publish their results in the name of 'level playing field' - all products subjected to the same test, despite its known shortcomings.
Collateral damage includes:
• Bad (compromised) information is in some ways more harmful than no information. Real anechoic chamber or outdoor measurements are expensive and Stereophile et al choose to side-step that expense without, in my opinion, proper contextualization / education for their readers.
• The normal reader does not have the education / information to extrapolate the real meaning from the compromised measurements.
• It is impolite for manufacturers to raise such issues in print, thereby becoming complicit in the misleading measurements.
• Many manufacturers design to measure well in the Stereophile-type quasi-anechoic measurements, rather than a justified standard.
• There are no firm rules for record producers. They are second-guessing how a loudspeaker (without standards) might reproduce their mix.
• A vagueness cycle (neither viscous nor virtuous) ensues.
And stuff like that. Note that the ear-brain, adept at synthesizing (remembering) how a real (insert instrument here) bass, etc. would sound in this playback room, (and should have sounded in that recording space - remember, we construct what we hear) can judge the more correct representation when given comparative choices. We at Thiel decided, at the beginning, that the only justifiable approach (to our understanding) was to design to anechoic-flat, just as a microphone is designed to anechoic-flat, except when it's not because Shure et al think that singers want to enhance their upper midrange formant. And the slippery slope gets slipperier and slipperier. I notice that there is more agreement now than 20-30 years ago about what is more correct. But, has there ever been an attempt by the Society of Audio Recording Engineers (and so forth) to standardize the design goal of the loudspeaker? Wouldn't that be a worthy undertaking? And the beat goes on - Amen.
