most accurate loudspeakers....

Viridian- I do like your thinking. If my man isn't to remote, he should go to dealers in his area toward the end of the week and see if they won't let him take home and audtion over the weekend. The latest Merlin monitors are getting a lot of press about their "accuracy". Their acoustic suspension designs as opposed to ported so their bass may be tauter and with better timbre than the latter designs but with less abundance. The word accuracy makes me think of Dynaudio, as well (Contour series and up). Chances are, my man may not know what's gonna groove him the most. In home auditions are the way to go.

the phrase "more accurate" is an oxymoron. all speakers are inaccurate. accuracy is dichotomous. there is a state of accuracy and a state of inaccuracy.

one can use the phrase less inaccurate to indicate a state which is closer to accurate, i.e., perfection.

as has already been said it is difficult to quantify inaccuracy. it is possibly to provide measurements of various parameters. then what ? how do you quantify accuracy, given measurement statistics ?

why not consider which speakers are most resolving, if that is your goal ?

Do we agree that it is less inaccurate if the speaker doesn't intentionally remove harmonic content by inverting the phase of the midrange relative to the tweeter and woofer? This "band aid" is used frequently in design by some of the most "prestigious" manufacturers in order to attempt to compensate for high order crossover anomalies.

At the very least do we agree that speakers should first minimize doing any harm to the signal they are fed? If so then why would we be interested in any speakers that intentionally, by design, actively "damage" the harmonic content of complex timbres that define voicing of various instruments and voices? Even electronic instruments that can be recorded and reproduced through the electronic chain as accurately as possible will suffer in this regard if harmonic content, complexity of overtones and timbre, are altered by intentional attempts to "correct" problems inherent in the electrical architecture of a speaker.

My personal quest has been to find speakers (with ancillary equipment) that do the best job of placing me in the same space with the performers. To create this illusion of reality is devoutly to be desired but is impossible to achieve completely. One's listening room must either be removed from the equation or tailored to reinforce/tone down anomalies. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the minute you place accurate speakers into a listening room they are no longer accurate sounding.

Dear Beemerrider,
I totally agree with you. The room and the speaker system have to be one organism. You cannot have one box playing in another box and hope for accuracy. You will only get higher and higher levels of audiophilia in conventional audio, but not accuracy. My two bit, if ever any of you go to Denmark, check out the SLT monitoring system in Focus Recording(www.focusrecording.dk) studios.