What stopped me was the way they reproduced John Lennon’s vocals on Across the Universe. They were simply plain wrong. I’d never heard Lennon’s voice sound like that in the mid/lower register before.
Very interesting, and reminds me of this interesting quote from Alan Shaw, designer of Harbeth speakers:
The core issue is this. Forget music entirely. Imagine that it never existed, had never been invented. Play well recorded human speech on those so-called high end speakers and the vast majority - practically all of them - have colorations, peculiarities, weird subjective characteristics that are in many cases simply laughable.
So then, why will you never find a hifi reviewer who even attempts to grade loudspeakers by listening to human speech over them? Absurd and pathetic, considering that we are surrounded by speech - not music - all day and every day, and unsurprisingly, our ear/brain is finely tuned to interpreting extremely subtle nuances in speech, even on a telephone line. If we were to be talking now on the restricted bandwidth of a phone line, we could understand each other’s emotions, guess at our age and education, probably income, detect if we are being truthful or concealing something, decide if we are friendly or trying to deceive us or sell us something and so on just by microscopic nuanced changes in loudness, pitch, strain and delivery. Human speech is the ultimate loudspeaker test tool because of the way it can impose its own nature on the underlying subtleties of reproduced speech, changing the listener’s interpretation a little or a lot.
