Flat frequency response

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.

A waterfall plot shows decay times describing the acoustics in that particular ROOM

roxy54

Thanks !

erik_squires

Where did you take Speaker Design 101? Is there a particular author / engineer whose course or book on speaker design you are referring to?

You make a good point. I have not seen flat FR as a design goal in any text. I should have put "Speaker Design 101" in quotes. My bad.

My guess, based on your questions is that you have none of that background,

Very cool you have that skill but IMHO should not be a requirement to have an opinion or yours would be the only response here, haha. With your design experience, I would be interested what you think about "1) Why is it so hard to achieve?"

Yes I do but I would rather example JA saying things like "That midrange deviation from flat will give vocals a nasal quality." Disclaimer: this is from memory, not an exact quote. I just used quotes for clarity.

But enough about me, back to the topic on hand, I am guessing your answer to "2) Does it matter?" would be no?

Theres lots to learn on the topic of frequency response.

Are you familiar with "The Harman Curve"? That could be a fun place to start!

Any quality company around $1k and up will do computer simulation 

and frequency phase plots and account for peaks in the Xover .

thsts another area ,having owned a Audio store for a decade and being a die hard Audiophile that’s one area 95% of all mfg  go cheap why because of $$ either Chinese capacitors or low average Solen caps , and cheap ceramic resistors 

even inductors tiny Bobbins, or sledge hammer type .

I bought a 5 year old Dynaudio ,they are very good Jantzen open core inductors 

caps and resistors ok , I put in muncher higher grade parts ,a solid 15% improvement many people don’t understand ,it’s the 🧠 or ♥️ of your loudspeaker ,

the entire Signal goes through there , Even $25 k martens ,Magico A5 and Wilsons , they use decent rated a 9 on the capacitir scale ,Mundorfs best caps are their supreme in several flavors,marten and Magico use the much cheaper Evo caps why ? They get 50% off .rule of thumb 25% no more goes into the build including packaging ,the rest R&D overhead and markup ,this too applies to electronics.

that’s why I highly recommended to upgrade any loudspeaker Xover you plan on keep a major Sonic upgrade.