@exfoliate
Dr. Toole has a wealth of knowledge and far more experience than most experts. I trust what he says to be true. I think frequency response is primary but I can’t believe he would say that this is all that matters. After frequency response and harmonic distortion measurements then even dispersion response and finally waterfall is very important. Stereophile show off -axis dispersion and waterfall plots on most speaker tests.
Furthermore, we know that concert hall reverberation and room RT60 are very important to our enjoyment of music. Sabin studied this extensively. Anyone who says spurious artifacts and poorly damped resonances (easily visible in a waterfall plot) aren’t important is ignoring a very important aspect of SOTA design.
One interesting fact about any unusual bumps in the frequency response is that they are often an indication of some undesirable resonance that will be even more evident in a waterfall plot and visible in the impedance curve too. So flat frequency response is indeed the most important indicator of a good speaker - even transducers should have a flat smooth response across their useful bandwidth and any unusual wiggles usually indicate trouble.
Dr. Toole has a wealth of knowledge and far more experience than most experts. I trust what he says to be true. I think frequency response is primary but I can’t believe he would say that this is all that matters. After frequency response and harmonic distortion measurements then even dispersion response and finally waterfall is very important. Stereophile show off -axis dispersion and waterfall plots on most speaker tests.
Furthermore, we know that concert hall reverberation and room RT60 are very important to our enjoyment of music. Sabin studied this extensively. Anyone who says spurious artifacts and poorly damped resonances (easily visible in a waterfall plot) aren’t important is ignoring a very important aspect of SOTA design.
One interesting fact about any unusual bumps in the frequency response is that they are often an indication of some undesirable resonance that will be even more evident in a waterfall plot and visible in the impedance curve too. So flat frequency response is indeed the most important indicator of a good speaker - even transducers should have a flat smooth response across their useful bandwidth and any unusual wiggles usually indicate trouble.