D'Appolito on What Matters


For anyone interested in evaluating loudspeakers and measurements thereof I found a very recent (November 10, 2016) article by the good Dr. Joseph D'Appolito. A man who quite literally wrote the book on speaker testing.

I share this knowing it will start endless flame wars, but still hopeful some will find it informative.

http://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-which-measurements-matter-part-1
erik_squires
no, that was a pro-Maggie comment

how about a book on the history of speakers?  the title could be:

"From Horns to Here"

with a sub-title of:

Edgar Villchur Died For your Sins
Something to mull over.
There is a question to be asked with D’Appolito speakers, that have the critical midrange handled by two drivers.
For them to be free of any type of problems, the two drivers that are doing the same job, have to be 100% T/S matched and work in absolute unison to be effective in producing those midrange frequencies as good as one driver can do.
I’ve never had two speakers measure identical T/S parameters even from the same batch.

Cheers George
In case others don't know, D'Appolito has designed many different types of speakers but he is most famous for the configuration that bears his name, the MTM (midwoofer, tweeter, midwoofer). Not all MTM designs are D'Appolito and not every speaker D'Appolito has designed are MTM. :)

As far as the mids matching, the design doesn't suffer from those problem so much. You en up hearing the average of the two drivers, assuming the speaker is properly designed. Some would even argue you'll get more consistent results by using 2 drivers, as the average will tend to vary less than any single speaker.

The D'Appolito also has improved room interactions vs. traditional 2-way speakers and in the midrange act closer to line sources.

I'd give them a listen, but not saying you should buy them.
^Can't comment on the D'Appolito's, but Dunlavy used a similar       W M T M W  driver configuration (with different cross-overs of course). 
It has been claimed that he had all parts tested, logged and matched accordingly, and then the cross-overs for each speaker was individually tweaked to match a reference.
http://www.stereophile.com/content/dunlavy-audio-labs-signature-sc-vi-loudspeaker-specifications#Gkx...