Are your speakers designed for your listening taste and hearing ability?


It occurs to me that speaker manufacturer’s and designers in many cases design their speaker ( and its subsequent sound) to the expected ’typical’ buyer. IME, a lot of high end speakers are designed to appeal to the consumer who has a certain amount of ’hearing loss’ due to age! This might sound odd, but I think that there are a lot of a’philes who have reached a certain age and have now two things going for them..1) A large enough wallet that the expense of the speaker isn’t really the issue and 2) a certain amount of high frequency hearing loss. This circumstance leads to designers and manufacturer’s bringing out speakers that are a) bright, b) inaccurate in their high frequency reproduction and c) not accurate in their reproduction across the frequency spectrum ( some may be tipped up in the highs, as an example). My impression is that a certain technology catches on--like the metal dome ( beryllium or titanium, as an example) and the manufacturer sees a certain public acceptance of this technology from the --shall we say-- less abled in the high frequency hearing dept, and the rest is as they say...history. Your thoughts?
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Showing 4 responses by kenjit

Given that there are hundreds of speaker companies, there will be hundreds of different approaches. Some will tune their speakers to sound good to their ears while others will guess what audiophiles want and try to tune accordingly. 

I think the key thing to remember is that:

A) Audiophiles have such bad hearing that you can get away with pretty much any kind of sound thesedays. Just stick a high price tag on it and it will sell. 

B) Speaker designers are not 100% knowledgeable about what they are doing or how to achieve what they want. It's all trial and error folks. There are no standards to meet so there's no right or wrong!
Most designers admit that the correlation between measurements and sound quality is tenuous. But Nigel you seem to think that the correlation is perfect. You correlate every tiny difference that people claim to hear with a simplified on axis response curve. Thats where you're mistaken. 
The B&W and Golden Ear comparison in my blog post is a great illustrator of this phenomenon.
Thats what nigel thinks but the other possibility is that the measurements are all wrong and so is his interpretation of them.