Bright High End Speakers = Bad Room?

Speakers that are very 'revealing' are often considered to be bright. 'Bright' speakers have become something to fear and avoid. I refer to many of them as 'clear'. Padding a speaker down in an effort to flat line on a chart can/will soften the sound by removing detail. High end audio is high resolution. If the speaker is capable of sounding natural at a high resolution then I find it to be wonderful clarity. Why remove detail that you've worked so hard to attain? However, it will be critical of poorly made recordings. Over processed music out of a high resolution speaker can and will sound edgy. Good recordings are amazingly clear and sound incredible when done right. 

Good quality headphones are extremely clear. I began use them as a baseline for the clarity of my speakers. This put me on the 'bright side' of neutral and I much prefer it.

Agreed. Don't want the speakers to do the eq-ing. There are other tools for that where you actually know what is done and only when it's needed.

It all come down to enjoyment.  Even if you sit there thinking to yourself, Wow, these speakers are really accurate, how wonderful!, if you cringe and shudder even time the massed violins come in forte, then there's not much point to it, is there?  In music, emotional enjoyment > intellectual enjoyment.

Then there are speakers that are more bright than they actually should be, which may be fine as a working tool identifying problems in a recording.

Pro speakers for recording rigs in studios with consoles (64 channels, etc) are designed to be bright, or chosen for their unnatural brightness...as a form of revealing what is put in a mix. So that it is spotlit and thus manipulable, workable, mutable, changeable. Where slight changes in the recording can be heard. It is purposely exaggerated and unnatural.

This means you should never think that a studio monitor speaker is even remotely suitable for neutral and balanced home use. They are emphatically not.

Neutral speakers for mastering, is another thing altogether.

This is true most of the time, so much so that it is a logical maxim. There will be exceptions or people taking exception with such statement. Sure. Whatever... But it is very much a norm in recording studios. Horses for courses.

NS-10 speakers from Yamaha, for example... are trash. Utter trash, and not suitable for home use or balanced listening to actual recordings in your home. Unless one is a masochist.

The anechoic and/or quasi-anechoic measurements people are used to seeing are supposed to be flat.
In a room you should have a descending response from around 100-150 Hz. This is what all of the automated room-correction software tries to do, more or less. They don’t attempt a ruler flat response for exactly the reason stated by the OP.


There are some other things going on in tweeters I'd like to mention though.


B&W and some other "high end" speakers use a ragged tweeter response designed to elicit a sense of detail. This is a trait I blame Stereophile for hyping/promoting as "neutral." It isn't.


Brands which shy away from this kind of tweeter trickery are Magico, Vandersteen and YG Acoustics.  However, that doesn't mean the rest of their response is ruler flat/accurate either. Just that they at least don't try this hyper-detail trickery.  Of course, I call it trickery, you might call it a wonderful feature. :)


Having said all this, I also find that the floor area behind/between the speakers is an unexpected place for harshness in a speaker sound. If you have a solid floor or rack between the speakers, it’s worth experimenting with blankets/pillows in the area.