Should Speaker Manufactures provide a Frequency Response Graph?


Eric at Tekton Designs has been battling two different reviewers who have posted measurements without his permission, using Klippel devices for their respective measurements.

It seems to me that if manufactures provide a simple smoothed out graph, consumers can see how much a speaker is editorializing with a frequency response that deviates from neutral.  

seanheis1

"As engineer for 20+ years I can assure you 99% of the high tech things you use (or even keep you alive, I work in the biopharmaceutical industy) (sic) were build or designed using models."
I do not doubt this, however I do not need to know and am not interested in measurements; I am interested in how they sound to me and whether I like that sound.

"Some of the responses here display the anti-science attitude which I find very frustrating in this forum." - see my comment above.

 

A major consideration where run of the mill measurements completely miss the mark is the materials used in the drivers themselves. For example, Kevlar, polyprop, etc used in drivers that measure perfectly...you might as well throw a blanket on your speaker before you started listening.

This is one of the reasons i don’t like the low effort/resources brands who buy mass market drivers from someone else and put it in a box. It takes some guy who has put serious thought into the materials used in drivers and developed his own from scratch.

We could go on about crossovers, etc... barrel bottom quality components in crossovers can still measure perfectly. With sim software, you can very quickly design great crossovers, But, as you move up in quality of components used, the sound totally changes, i.e. the measurements say little about "quality" (whatever that word means to you).

Last, but not the least, humans perceive way too much in transients (spatial nuance, etc). The configuration (Drivers+crossovers+box) that gets botched w.r.t the latter, no matter how great it measures with traditional measurements will sound like a ..."meh".

The above mentioned perhaps falls into the "esoterica" (dismissed) category for the ASR type of guy, another reason i despise that loathsome forum.

Manufacturers should include specs and explanation of how measurements were made for reference. It adds credibility for their design philosophy, then have a listen. Why would anyone want to look a Porsche 911 specs or its track performance? They are just measurements, my family vehicle feels faster. 

"Why would anyone want to look a Porsche 911 specs or its track performance? "

That is precisely the point. Why do you need to look at 911 specs? We all knowit is a great car.

 

@erik_squires wrote:  "I'd much rather see off-axis frequency plots as done by Stereophile and others, as well as dynamic range plots."

Yes!  The off-axis information in particular is imo extremely useful.

I WISH John Atkinson did not "normalize" his off-axis curves, as that makes it harder to see the overall picture of what's REALLY going on.  I think that for one or maybe two issues he posted off-axis curves that were NOT normalized to the on-axis curve, but then he went back to posting normalized curves.

Duke