"Paul Barton, of PSB, worked with Toole, Harmon and others back in the day of speaker testing. Check out Darko's interview with him. Worth a listen.
Lots of people like to name drop the audio greats and then go on to reengineer their methods of testing while hoping no one catches on or knows better on just how to do it, fancying themselves as being oh, so, scientific.
Paul pointed out that when doing the first round of speaker testing (1/2 hours worth), the tests were thrown out the window due to the fact that the people were listening to the room and not the speakers. Evaluations were all over the place. It's why one has a better chance on getting their ears around a speaker in the confines of their own listening room."
That is NOT at all what he said. He is talking about adaptation or how we can "hear through a room." This adaptation takes a few minutes so people in controlled tests needs to be allowed to acclimate a bit. He said nothing whatsoever about "confines of their own listening room." You made that up. Here are some bits I transcribed:
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"Before you were introduced to dr. toole were you designing by ear..
Yes, I was designing based on early days ..... pink noise listening to it and music... when I took the first speaker to Ottawa [at NRC], there were clearly things that could be improved based on theory that speaker is a window.... flat frequency response and dispersion are all a factor."
"[measurements at NRC] put a microscope on what I was doing... correlating measurements with listener preference."
1. Most of the people most of the time agree on relative quality of a group of loudspeaker. There is no personal taste when it comes to asking what sounds the most natural. That is the goal to make the recording exactly the musician intended.
2. Properly interpreted set of objective measurements correlate strongly with listener preferences. You can see the measurements and predict how listeners will prefer.
[3] Musical tastes and experience is not material.
When listeners go into the room, it will take a few minutes for listeners to adjust to the acoustics of the room. After that, they are able to sort out the speakers from room.
We did both stereo and mono listening.... did the same experiment in mono and stereo (double blind)...when testing in stereo the anchor [bad speaker] got better in stereo because stereo masks tonal aspects of a speaker. You get better differentiation between sonic differences of speakers in mono than stereo. Most of stereo imaging we hear is in the recording, not the room.
The final tuning is done by ear, i.e. ratio of highs to lows. Darko summarizing: "95% is done with measurements last bit is done by ear." Tuning is still done using measurements. Subjecting himself to double blind as he tweaks.
"We can measure everything... but the scale of it you judge by ear."
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So yes, people need to listen to that podcast. It is wonderful and fascinating to see how Darko's mind is shifting toward objective side of things.
