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Should a reference speaker be neutral, or just great sounding?

I was thinking about something as I was typing about how I've observed a magazine behave, and it occurred to me that I have a personal bias not everyone may agree to.  Here's what I think:
"To call a speaker a reference product it should at the very least be objectively neutral."

However, as that magazine points out, many great speakers are idiosyncratic ideas about what music should sound like in the home, regardless of being tonally neutral.

Do you agree?  If a speaker is a "reference" product, do you expect it to be neutral, or do you think it has to perform exceptionally well, but not necessarily this way?
erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by millercarbon

millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Thank you. I wasn't going to be the one to point that out but you are right, my room is the reference. Especially now with my modded Moabs.
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
A reference is anything you refer to. For words we can refer to a dictionary. You could look it up and see, that is literally the meaning of reference. Nothing about neutrality, objectivity, or anything like that. Your reference could be a Picasso painting of a woman with three boobs and a few other odd body parts. Your reference could be last years iPhone. 

A reference is nothing more than a standard. There's nothing objective about it, not at all. A meter is a reference, defined about as objectively and with as much precision as anything probably ever could be. Yet the meter itself is totally arbitrary. We just decided for convention to make it what it is. 

Same with your speaker reference. Totally arbitrary. Make it what you will.
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