Bright High End Speakers = Bad Room?

I find that the most natural and comfortable to listen to speakers are the ones that employ some subtle version of "The BBC Dip".

Highly revealing, spacious, well done lower slope crossovers, fast, tuneful, all of it, with a slight BBC Dip. Clean and warm, as the mix demands. A properly done BBC Dip, in my design experience....has the lowest part of the dip centered around 3.5khz and then goes back up again, and is about 2db deep, overall, as a best potential compromise.

And then it’s good all around and it can play all day, at any volume. From soft to break the windows levels...

Everything else that might be off.....is generally just bad equipment choices. (It is a multistage learning curve and individually committed to as an act --same goal, and very probably a different path for each person)

This graph has it as being slightly exaggerated but warming up to being ideal.

Then there are speakers that are more bright than they actually should be, which may be fine as a working tool identifying problems in a recording.

Pro speakers for recording rigs in studios with consoles (64 channels, etc) are designed to be bright, or chosen for their unnatural brightness...as a form of revealing what is put in a mix. So that it is spotlit and thus manipulable, workable, mutable, changeable. Where slight changes in the recording can be heard. It is purposely exaggerated and unnatural.

This means you should never think that a studio monitor speaker is even remotely suitable for neutral and balanced home use. They are emphatically not.

Neutral speakers for mastering, is another thing altogether.

This is true most of the time, so much so that it is a logical maxim. There will be exceptions or people taking exception with such statement. Sure. Whatever... But it is very much a norm in recording studios. Horses for courses.

NS-10 speakers from Yamaha, for example... are trash. Utter trash, and not suitable for home use or balanced listening to actual recordings in your home. Unless one is a masochist.

Duke,
That is an fantastic post!
I had a feeling the general "view" may have also been tied to typical tweeter emission, but did not feel confident enough in what the "typical" speaker was in this community to suggest it.

I always put effort into room treatment and response trying to achieve flatness which could be why I am not a fan of the dip since I have addressed excess energy already.

The second point is that this area of the frequency spectrum is the peak of the ’intelligence’ read for the human ear.

men use it to tell where the threat is coming from (directional, closeness) in the jungle scenarios, etc. Women use that frequency spectrum a bit differently, they use it to tell the difference between the cries of children, re health, etc. They use it to understand the sounds of the very very young.

so men can be excited by peaks in that area of the spectrum, and women will be powerfully turned off and agitated by it, in all the wrong ways. men think it is exciting and invigorating, in some critical ways, and women think of that sound as someone killing or torturing children.

So if you want spousal harmony...as an audiophile in a shared space....it is easy.

Put in the effort.....and .....Don’t go there.

~3-4khz, no peaks, no resonance, no honking, nothing but a clean slight/subtle dip.

When a speaker does the screech thing, it is usually screeching in the mentioned frequency area. I personally won’t even go into the given room at an audio show, I can hear it from outside the door. This is also the top range of the ear canal resonance range areas.

Things are a bit conflated in this (canal resonance vs hearing peaks vs intelligence reads), but it is notably real. Whatever we build, or make, we make absolutely sure this peak area of importance does not exist as a problem.

And that is how you help get the other 50% of the human race into the audio world.

Note that the most favored ’high slope required’ mid-bass drivers start to go nutty and slurred in this area of the frequency range. I would not touch any of those drivers with a barge pole. It leaves you down to about maybe a dozen or less drivers that actually function correctly - in the entire world of available drivers.