As much as I try, I just don't get it........

I have a perspective a lot of folks here don't in that I've been a professional recording engineer for over 30 years.  I listen to sources, I choose their placement in a given room (which often makes a HUGE difference), I choose the microphone that either flatters the sound of the source I'd like to spotlight in the finished recording, or one that is flat and neutral.  I also choose one that has the polar pickup pattern that works best for the source, where it is in the room, the mic's distance from the source, and what else is playing in the room. What does their projection sound like from the microphone's point of view and how does it alter the sound of the source as heard by that microphone?  Sometimes I process that signal on the way in to the recording system, but more often than not I leave those decisions for the mix.

So when I see a Youtube video shot on a phone or a camcorder with ultra-cheap electret condenser mics and a ton of onboard processing with auto gain and limiting built in, moving around a room picking up the sound of a loudspeaker from a distance where room reflections become a critical component of the sound, I know only that I am *not* hearing anything more than a lousy recording, vaguely evocative of how the speaker sounds in that locations through those crappy mics.  And then it goes through the camera's codec and Youtube's codec afterward.  Then I listen back through the coloration of *my* speakers.  By the time you hear a recording of a component or loudspeaker on Youtube, all that's really left to judge critically is how it looks,  which seems to be how many audiophiles tend to listen anyway- with their eyes.

Nothing about youtube, but about the above statement. On two occassions, at Harman store when asking to hear different Revel speakers, the source was.......mp3s from a Samsung phone connected via 3.5mm headphone output.

As long as the other speakers you're comparing use a similar source you have a baseline.  There is zero baseline on Youtube videos.  It's impossible to tell if the person who shot the video was using the ultra cheap microphone built into their camera or the one in their phone.  It is ridiculous on its face.  But then so much of this hobby is. 

Daj says:

Nice. To me, this blows up the argument of uselessness.

The fact that the mics are better than a camera mic moving around the room doesn't mitigate the fact that Rode are, at best, "meh" microphones.  Nevertheless there is a baseline established and maintained.  That's a step above.  But the placement of the mics lets you know how each of those speakers sound off-axis only, not what the on-axis sound is like at what would be a typical listening position.  Even with a single set of speakers A/Bing them miked from the position shown in the video with mics placed at the apex of a triangle typical to a home listening setup would sound at least as different from one another as multiple speakers miked the way they are in the video.  Position those same mics like that on an electrostatic speaker and it would sound absolutely nothing like how it would to a person in the sweet spot.  At the distance in the video most cardioid mics are still pretty beamy and the distance between drivers of the floor standing speakers will definitely affect what gets picked up.  The stand mounted speakers look to have their drivers more or less equidistant from the microphones so they might well have the advantage of less phase cancellation.