the big one: how do you choose speakers? By what features, data?

In reading these posts, it seems many people do grasp the challenge of "room sound" -that their future speakers need to work well in their room- but the way of assessing this is through their own listening impressions. This is not a reliable method for if you have not heard "correct" sounds, don’t know how to listen, you can very easily choose a speaker that appears to sonically solve room problems. Put a simpler way, if you room lacks bass, you seek a speaker that has more bass (than flat) to compensate. We see this all the time in studios, even more so in home systems. IF the listener does not know what correct is, they can often chase their tail and jump from speaker to speaker to speaker based around perceived playback results.

Solution? In pro its to measure the room and understand the room first, decide what you can do to fix it acoustically before attempting to "solve " it through loudspeakers. Another method is to educate the listener on what "good" playback actually sounds like, which often can be very illusive as many stores demo rooms and playback systems are severely flawed yet are passed on as a "standard". This can leave the speaker customer in quite a quandary as he or she attempts to define "good" when there is no available consensus or positive standard they can assess.

This points us to the question of: does the hi fi enthusiast need to learn how to listen and acquire the listening skills to know "this is good bass", "this is too much bass", "this is not enough bass"? Once that info is roughly understood then it possible to relate it to your own room and know, yes this system in my room is close or not close. A skilled sales person can manipulate a customer to think just about anything they want based on subtle source choices, level choices and combinations of gear in front of the speaker. This may be manipulative or it may be in the customers best interest, as determined but the store’s/saleperson’s intentions. So finding a trusted salesperson or educated friend teach you how to listen can be the entire ball game. A home system with no reference can lead a purchaser down an expensive (and ultimately incorrect) path.

We arrive back at the idea that learning how to listen and hearing a "good" system may indeed be the single most important skill to acquire.

Perhaps hi fi shows are best for establishing this "reference" information, as one can listen for periods of time to systems that are well set up and do sound correct.

Brad

@fleschler

I think you are right about a Yamaha receiver- Ive bought several in different houses as the sound and feature set is good even at low cost levels. In my own world (as I do import both pro and hi fi ATC to the US), a pair of ATC SCM 11’s that are around 2K new gets you pretty much in right ball park. A reasonable receiver will get you the same sound as the studio most of the time, depending on room.

Some say we should seek tight bass? Maybe so, but this is HEAVILY influenced by the room. You can have a tight bass speaker not sound tight in many different kinds of spaces, especially reflective ones, square or rectangular with even dimensions of placement, hard floors, hard walls, low hard ceiling ones. Room "standing waves" can make one think the speaker’s bass is anything but tight and this is 100% room. [To know for sure, just take your speakers outside where there are no walls, and see if the bass is tight. Second choice, take speaker to a largest room you can get, set up in the middle away from all surfaces.] Ceramic tile or stone floors will mess up any speaker; a wall of glass will mess up imaging, speakers right up agains side walls will never image as well as they could, and the list goes on.

So in your listening room., shoot for uneven dimensions, no square or round rooms, no low ceilings, avoid glass in the room, avoid anything highly [acoustically) reflective in the room. Soft surfaces everywhere helps. If the room has any echo when you talk, it will be FOR SURE horrible for playback of audio no matter where you put the speakers.

Brad

There are multiple great speaker engineers out there. It would be wise to follow all of them for their pearls of wisdom.

Raymond Cooke- KEF- taught most everyone how to design speakers and almost every one that followed him looked up to him as a leader. He worked for Wharfedale and left to pursue "the science" of loudspeakers (not "the business") . He is credited with a focus on research and scientific principles and has many inventions to his name. He spurred many other careers, such as development of the BBC monitor kit (LS3/5a) that spurred several BBC engineers to open their own manufacturing operations to build this monitor for the BBC under license (Spendor, Harbeth, etc). Raymond sold the company in 1992 to Gold Peak, a Hong Kong based company that owns many other brands. Suprisingly, 1992 was when the KEF driver kit for the LS3-5A was finally discontinued.

Doug Button. He is now with Sonos and did the ERA 300 but also was with EV (Vented drivers) and then JBL (EON) and developed industry changing products at all of them. He is amazing.

Billy Woodman-ATC- developed some of the lowest distortion drivers ever built, developed the mid dome idea and pioneered active systems (impacted the high end pro market).

ilpo Martikainen- Genelec- on a parallel track to Billy and developed active monitors, the first quantity manufactured professional active monitor system. He impacted the worldwide pro market significantly and spurred many copies as "active" became the way to do it.

There are many many more......