Twoleftears above has it right:
"listen[ing] to a digitally synthesized simulacrum of various speakers they sold."Yes. These are NOT recordings of speakers in rooms.
What they have done is to take a real speaker through a measurement session ala Stereophile, with the microphone likely one meter away, in front of the tweeter. There was no measurement made of a stereo pair.
The resulting numbers were given to software to shape/distort the music waveform. This can include "turn up the highs", "pump up the bass", "roll off the lowest bass", "dip the upper voice range a bit". Maybe it will also shift the acoustic phase, which changes from bass to treble by different amounts on different speakers. It might even give you the ringing of a metal cone or a cabinet booming. Regardless, their speaker-measurements are completely insufficient to capture how a speaker interacts with a room AND how it sounds at ten feet away.
This makes their software math incapable of calculating how any speaker ’sounds’ in a room at ten feet away, let alone two speakers. But really, coppy777 and snapsc are very wise about what’s most important: Crutchfield is attracting the attention of those who hadn’t yet thought very much about LISTENING for differences. These shoppers already know they can hear differences or they wouldn’t be looking at "little-known" brands. And they also know most USA specialty retailers are gone, so there’s nowhere to listen. But now here’s a way to listen that Crutchfield believes useful enough to have sunk a lot of money into its development. Crutchfield would be smart expand their range of music samples. In all genres, there are important styles or performances to hear a speaker ’get right’.
