What if a high end speaker measures really badly?

@erik_squires wrote:  "I'm reading @audiokinesis but avoiding commenting when I just don't know what I'm talking about.  Honestly my experience with very poor measuring speakers is rather limited so I yield the floor. 🤣"

Here is Floyd Toole being much more succinct than me:

"A ripple in the on-axis curve may be acoustical interference (not very audible, or inaudible), but if it replicates in spatially averaged measurements it is almost certainly evidence of a resonance."

What if there is no measurements?  People gravitate towards pricings right away, higher price = greater sound, lower price = poor sound

I can hear a pair of speakers, and by how they sound, I can usually be pretty accurate on what parameters will measure badly.

I have built and upgraded enough speakers in my life, to let me know where the problem measurements will be. I tend to be pretty sensitive to the sound of stored energy, that is visible in the waterfall plot.

@sounds_real_audio

I honestly do not need to look at the spec’s to know if a speaker sounds good.....but if you do and if you that is important to you then knock yourself out......

You have it a bit backwards from the way I approach speaker measurements.

I don’t look at the measurements, then judge how good the speaker is based on them. I listen to the speaker, then judge whether I like it or not, then I look at the measurements to see why I did or did not like the speakers.

As I said above, I can listen to speakers, and easily pick out too much stored energy in the system.

As long as it gets good reviews on how it sounds, I do not see that bad measurements matter much.

@cdc You don’t have the reviewers’ ears. So, anything subjective said is like throwing darts. I ignore the subjective crap they throw out because it is useless to me. 

I look at the measurements on Stereophile - ignore the platitudes.