Specs may give you a hint, but will never fully tell you what a speaker will sound like. Those who simply want to reject all speakers which are not phase coherent or which have certain shaped impedance curves or which are this much efficient or inefficient all miss the point. You can't take a single piece of data out of the context of the product as a whole. These are speaker SYSTEMS, which mean that they rely on many factors to reproduce sound. Some of these factors are known and can be measured. Others are most certainly unknown as to why one speaker will sound better than another. Moreover, the conventional wisdom as to what factors are important in designing a high-quality speaker system are certainly only half-true or perhaps will be proven not true at all in the future. Indeed, using our ears alone, we cannot even agree on what is an excellent high-quality speaker for the large part. So how can we agree on what are the essential must-have ingredients and designs for an excellent speaker? My feeling is, unless we design speakers for a living, the less said about the "how" as justification for great sound, the better. We don't really know if the "how" is the "why" for the great sound we think we are hearing. We are typically only relying on what the manufacturers are telling us. Can't we just relax and enjoy the music without fighting about the engineering and can't we all just get along?
