DonT relax anything... Go on criticize them those costlier speakers designer... I will congratulate you for that...
And who in his right mind can oppose to someone who ask " for flat on axis response and smooth off-axis." Not me ...
But designers will go on with their trade off choices and you will criticize them... All is OK...i will read you...
But dont come to me saying that all there is to say about audio components is their measures set...And dont come to me saying that human hearing impression are all illusory and with no value out of blind test ...
Psycho-acoustic dont say that... Trained ears are not the same as untrained one... Furtwangler and Floyd Toole or Dr Choueri or the creator of my headphone a physicist acoustician of genius Dr Gorike all had trained ears...dont put them in the same basket as people who buy an amplifier for the price tag and dials... Dont put them in the same basket than people unable to tune their own room... Etc...
The human ears beat the Fourier uncertainty why ?
Because he use some aspects of sound by virtue of his non linear structure and brain tools which made him able to EXTRACT 10 times the accuracy information in the time domain permitted by the linear Fourier treshold between frequency and time ... This means that hearing is not explanable only by Fourier methods, and it means that human hearing can be trained and is very trustful when trained at long term... Furtwangler dont need a blind test...he dont pick up his amplifier by reading your measures... It does not means that measures are useless... Who would pair the wrong amplifier with the wrong measures to the wrong speakers? We need measure for regularity and standards... Deriving all audible qualities from them is non sense...
No one is taking away anyone’s choices in designing a speaker. Nothing about what I or audio science stands for mandates anything in that regard. We simply as for flat on axis response and smooth off-axis. You can get there a million ways.
To be sure, it is not my job, and should not be yours either, to make anything easy for manufactures/designers. They have their challenges and they signed up for that when they decided to get into that business. I am a consumer and want a performant system. You can’t deliver it? Don’t get in the market.
We have speakers that cost just a few hundred dollars that deliver on these metrics. That expensive speakers costing many multiples can’t is no reason to relax the criteria for them