Here are my ramblings about why you can never reliably qualify a speaker system and why there are so many great brands and speakers.
I believe that speakers brands are like Cuisine there is no good or bad. Just because you dont like Thai or Japanese food does not mean they are bad. There will be people who love them and there will be people who hate them. So unless you try them yourself you will never know. You can listen to suggestions but at the end of the day its your choice.
I also don't believe that spectral analysis and frequency response graphs
will give you the whole picture. How something sounds is a combination of multiple frequencies coming out of the speaker at the same time interacting with one another from different drivers at different locations in the baffle and then hitting your eardrum. Its a complex temporal system. Unless you can setup a individual mics that can pickup each frequency separately in 3-D over time you simply cannot capture what's really happening.
These graphs might be useful tools for Q/A purposes during
Manufacturing but not a way to judge the listening quality of the speakers.
Its like saying just because the we added 0.1% salt, 0.5% pepper and 5% tomato etc the biriyani will taste absolutely Great. The taste comes from cooking them together and how individual flavors and tastes interact to produce a great dish. Similarly we cannot say a dish is bad just because there is too little or too much tomato, it might actually make it taste better.
We dont qualify the taste of food using a spectrographs (or Mass spectrometry). We don't analyze the percentage of salt , pepper , turmeric etc in some dish and say its good or bad. When you know that the Taste sense can never be qualified by spectrograph, how come we do this for our hearing sense?
Extending the same analogy, food from a bad quality restaurant with low quality ingredients will taste bad, so speakers from companies who do not use good materials, QA and research will sound bad.
On the other hand just like there are great chefs in a 2 star restaurants who know serve up great food for low cost and 5 star chefs who make bland or even bad food, There are low cost speakers which sound much better than their expensive counterparts.
In conclusion - The speakers are a matter of choice.
Magazines and other reviewers can point you in a right direction but at the end of the day its your choice.
I will post a few more of my ramblings if you find it interesting.
Thanks
Ravi Kiran.
I believe that speakers brands are like Cuisine there is no good or bad. Just because you dont like Thai or Japanese food does not mean they are bad. There will be people who love them and there will be people who hate them. So unless you try them yourself you will never know. You can listen to suggestions but at the end of the day its your choice.
I also don't believe that spectral analysis and frequency response graphs
will give you the whole picture. How something sounds is a combination of multiple frequencies coming out of the speaker at the same time interacting with one another from different drivers at different locations in the baffle and then hitting your eardrum. Its a complex temporal system. Unless you can setup a individual mics that can pickup each frequency separately in 3-D over time you simply cannot capture what's really happening.
These graphs might be useful tools for Q/A purposes during
Manufacturing but not a way to judge the listening quality of the speakers.
Its like saying just because the we added 0.1% salt, 0.5% pepper and 5% tomato etc the biriyani will taste absolutely Great. The taste comes from cooking them together and how individual flavors and tastes interact to produce a great dish. Similarly we cannot say a dish is bad just because there is too little or too much tomato, it might actually make it taste better.
We dont qualify the taste of food using a spectrographs (or Mass spectrometry). We don't analyze the percentage of salt , pepper , turmeric etc in some dish and say its good or bad. When you know that the Taste sense can never be qualified by spectrograph, how come we do this for our hearing sense?
Extending the same analogy, food from a bad quality restaurant with low quality ingredients will taste bad, so speakers from companies who do not use good materials, QA and research will sound bad.
On the other hand just like there are great chefs in a 2 star restaurants who know serve up great food for low cost and 5 star chefs who make bland or even bad food, There are low cost speakers which sound much better than their expensive counterparts.
In conclusion - The speakers are a matter of choice.
Magazines and other reviewers can point you in a right direction but at the end of the day its your choice.
I will post a few more of my ramblings if you find it interesting.
Thanks
Ravi Kiran.
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