Sean, you're right, but there's that hint of condescension in your post that just doesn't feel right to me, as I've always been an advocate of FFR, for example, and AM a musician, for example. But I won't belabor this....
Pbb, I agree too, but must remind us that the holy grail here is often a PERSONAL spectral tilt! Since many types of listeners have different preferences here, it's reasonable to expect that assembling components (especially transducers) into a room is not necessarily simply a matter of buying a bunch of flat-response nice products. A study done a while back (was it noted in Dickason? I forget) noted that the general public preferred a 2db/octave downward spectral tilt (THAT'S warm!), musicians preferred a 1db/octave roll, whereas audiophiles preferred a 0 to 0.5dB/octave roll. How these populations were matched for sex and age would be interesting to note, as the aging male audiophile loses sensitivity up top...so is there a compensaory preference here, or is it just that cleaner, high res equipment is more easily "acceptible" if the top octaves aren't rolled.
It's pretty clear that once speaker/room setup is completed, and electronic components are set up, we chase minor spectral flavorings in cables to attain our personal "tilt". Hence the common tendency to chase rolled-top cables that are not-so-mysteriously labelled as "smooth" or "fat-bottomed", or more musical (warmer tilt?).
That speaker manufacturers all have their "house" reference tilts that they prefer is no mystery. As long as the resultant sound of these boxes IN YOUR ROOM agrees with the manufacturer's voicers then success can be had without much secondary tweaking.
Being a Bostonian, I've followed Aeriel's history, and having briefly used the same cabinet maker as Kelly, and can attest to the difficulties he had with QA of the 10T bass cabinets. I remember seeing 10T cabs lined up, seeing the minor variations in each. Must've driven a technical design engineer like Michael nuts. I jokingly offered to consult with him on QA, but had enough of a hard time getting just 20 pair of my cabinets made consistently from Pine & Baker. That Aeriel was able to get a scandinavian high precision cabinet maker with state of the science CCM to manufacture nice complex cabinet clones for him is only a credit to their manufacturing excellence. I can't comment on Aeriel's price points...nor Michael Kelly's preferred spectral tilt, but I would expect that his design work is top notch, and perhaps Aeriel's speaker components are pretty tightly controlled, yielding reasonably matched pairs that are close to design reference. Such manufacturing precision is not just the realm of the high end, bien sure, as Boston, Snell, Revel et al have sucessfully controlled manufacturing processes tightly. Although I don't generally like the voicing of most Boston speakers (except the VR-MX surround), they DO take care to make quite nice, cloned tweeters that are much better than expected. Too bad they don't know how to implement them to my liking....
Sorry for this messy post...got interrupted by Ellen's matzoh pancakes!
Pbb, I agree too, but must remind us that the holy grail here is often a PERSONAL spectral tilt! Since many types of listeners have different preferences here, it's reasonable to expect that assembling components (especially transducers) into a room is not necessarily simply a matter of buying a bunch of flat-response nice products. A study done a while back (was it noted in Dickason? I forget) noted that the general public preferred a 2db/octave downward spectral tilt (THAT'S warm!), musicians preferred a 1db/octave roll, whereas audiophiles preferred a 0 to 0.5dB/octave roll. How these populations were matched for sex and age would be interesting to note, as the aging male audiophile loses sensitivity up top...so is there a compensaory preference here, or is it just that cleaner, high res equipment is more easily "acceptible" if the top octaves aren't rolled.
It's pretty clear that once speaker/room setup is completed, and electronic components are set up, we chase minor spectral flavorings in cables to attain our personal "tilt". Hence the common tendency to chase rolled-top cables that are not-so-mysteriously labelled as "smooth" or "fat-bottomed", or more musical (warmer tilt?).
That speaker manufacturers all have their "house" reference tilts that they prefer is no mystery. As long as the resultant sound of these boxes IN YOUR ROOM agrees with the manufacturer's voicers then success can be had without much secondary tweaking.
Being a Bostonian, I've followed Aeriel's history, and having briefly used the same cabinet maker as Kelly, and can attest to the difficulties he had with QA of the 10T bass cabinets. I remember seeing 10T cabs lined up, seeing the minor variations in each. Must've driven a technical design engineer like Michael nuts. I jokingly offered to consult with him on QA, but had enough of a hard time getting just 20 pair of my cabinets made consistently from Pine & Baker. That Aeriel was able to get a scandinavian high precision cabinet maker with state of the science CCM to manufacture nice complex cabinet clones for him is only a credit to their manufacturing excellence. I can't comment on Aeriel's price points...nor Michael Kelly's preferred spectral tilt, but I would expect that his design work is top notch, and perhaps Aeriel's speaker components are pretty tightly controlled, yielding reasonably matched pairs that are close to design reference. Such manufacturing precision is not just the realm of the high end, bien sure, as Boston, Snell, Revel et al have sucessfully controlled manufacturing processes tightly. Although I don't generally like the voicing of most Boston speakers (except the VR-MX surround), they DO take care to make quite nice, cloned tweeters that are much better than expected. Too bad they don't know how to implement them to my liking....
Sorry for this messy post...got interrupted by Ellen's matzoh pancakes!