When a budget speaker is preferred to a high end one...

I love Google experts. So much fun. A Kippel system at 100K does what far more expensive systems used to do, but it does it far better. A big turntable can increase the price. No longer a need for multimillion dollar anechoic chambers any more. All an large acoustic camera gives you is speed. Much of the cost is the anechoic chamber they are often in. You can use smaller ones for wavefront studies

There was a time when Dolby did not exist. No Bose. Heck not even Magico. Fortunately they didn’t go in with loser attitude. Dolby of late has created far more fundamental IP around audio than Matsushita has. Heard of Sonos? They could gave said we are too small and gave up. They didn’t and know are one of the largest sellers of audio products in the world

You seemed to completely lacked the comprehension of what I said about leveraging others expertise, MFG, and cost structures. There is still much room for innovation. Look at Kii or Dutch and Dutch. How about the Purifi woofer from a small company with some of the lowest distortion in it’s class.

You are not an entrepreneur. It is okay. Not everyone is.

nobody here seems to have accentuated one salient issue- the world of audio recordings is not all "audiophile-approved." the majority of surviving recordings are decidedly of sub-par audio quality, and even sub-par musical quality, and if you listen to these through a less ruthlessly revealing speaker system/total audio system with mainly "sins of omission," you stand a good chance of not being able to clearly hear the aforementioned audible sins, thereby allowing for a greater amount of relative enjoyment of a greater number of recordings then less sullied by the [now] glossed-over sins of commission on a mediocre record.

@emrofsemanon I have never found a less capable system to make music more enjoyable. That's just some bizarre phile lore that gets bandied about.

@m669326

To take an extreme case, a $200 speaker will very rarely sound better to the ttypical ears compared to a $2000 speaker. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but that’s my sense of things.

Mine too.

I generally agree about a calibration point but I do remember one occasion back in the 1990s when I auditioned quite a few speakers and none of them were doing it for me.

I was getting quite frustrated with the situation, the dealers and even myself (was this just me?).

I felt considerable sympathy towards the staff too. It wasn’t their fault that so many of the well reviewed designs of the day just sounded plain wrong to my ears.

As I was about to give up one of the sales staff suggested I give a listen to the bookshelf Rega Kytes (originals)... and suddenly - that was it!

Those small boxes produced a coherent sound that had no time anomalies and could communicate better than speakers costed which many times more.

I enjoyed those speakers for many years.

Eventually a friend introduced me to jazz, mainly Davis and Coltrane, and at that point I realised that the Kytes couldn’t do it full justice and began looking for speakers that could, as well as not losing the wonderful communication skills of the Rega’s.

Those Kytes cost £200 back then, so maybe they’d be around £400 today, but they sounded better to me than many much more expensive designs.

I’m fact, when it comes to the midrange, I’m not sure if I’ve heard anything much better since.

@emrofsemanon

Good point. Resolution can indeed be a double edged sword. Imagine watching a grainy scratchy black and white movie through the latest 4k TVs without it being remastered or upscaled.

You might be better off with something like 720p or even lower resolution.

I bet most young people today would have difficulty understanding how many of us were perfectly happy watching television on 19 inch black and white screens once upon a time.

As televisions got better - 405 to 625 lines and the introduction of colour, so did the recording side.

It had to.

The video / audio comparison is flawed and similar. The similarity is just like audio, once you reach a certain resolution (assuming equal viewing distance), then there is no improvement. Where it breaks down is that increased video resolution means increased bandwidth. We often don't like increase bandwidth because we can see flaws, i.e. poor skin complexion, that may be hidden in a lower bandwidth image. For audio, we tend not to dislike full bandwidth, though in similar fashion, if there is excessive high frequency energy, i.e. cymbal crashes, we may prefer a subdued version to the real one. A cheap speaker versus an expensive one does not work that way. I can guy a cheap speaker that easily does 20KHz without dropoff.

Distortion? No one likes distortion in video, whether optical or at the signal level. Think of blocking artifacts from compression. That is distortion. We don't like it because it is unnatural. Unless we are listening to music that has inherent distortion, electric guitar and other things were we associate distortion as art, what evidence is there we like distortion??  I looked. I cannot find any. More phile lore. I may have to trademark that "Philelore".   No, a distorted speaker just sounds bad. It never makes a bad recording sound good. It usually makes it sound worse.  I cannot say I have ever enjoyed a bad recording more on a cheap speaker or system. I have enjoyed a bad recording more by using an equalizer. A more expensive speaker is not a gurantee of better frequency response once it is in your room.