Flat frequency response

@cdc 

I agree with you.  I'm often surprised when I get to the measurements part of a Stereophile speaker review, and read about strange anomalies of the design, and then see a not-so-good waterfall plot from a very expensive speaker.

It might be because a speaker that measures ruler flat sounds like crap in an actual room.  Just a semi-educated guess. 

but can’t even get speaker design 101 right.

Can you please point us to speakers you have designed in the past? A write-up or measurements of them? Where did you take Speaker Design 101?  Is there a particular author /  engineer whose course or book on speaker design you are referring to?

That’s the sort of background I would expect from a post that claims speakers are not designed correctly.

My guess, based on your questions is that you have none of that background, but are interested audiophile who is trying to understand the meaning of frequency response measurements. 

Best,

E

Speakers with completely flat responses do not sound good. I have read articles from more than one speaker designer that attests to the fact that flat response speakers sound dry and lifeless. One sticks in my mind of a designer that could not decide between releasing his speaker which tested nearly perfectly flat or release it with great sound. In one case you sell to the specification people and in the other dedicated audio folks

This simply puts speakers in the same category as all other high end audio stuff. A simple measure or two does not characterize performance to the human ear. So, to design great audio equipment… the important, very time consuming part is human listening tests and tweaking to make it sound good.