most accurate loudspeakers....

My personal quest has been to find speakers (with ancillary equipment) that do the best job of placing me in the same space with the performers. To create this illusion of reality is devoutly to be desired but is impossible to achieve completely. One's listening room must either be removed from the equation or tailored to reinforce/tone down anomalies. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the minute you place accurate speakers into a listening room they are no longer accurate sounding.

Dear Beemerrider,
I totally agree with you. The room and the speaker system have to be one organism. You cannot have one box playing in another box and hope for accuracy. You will only get higher and higher levels of audiophilia in conventional audio, but not accuracy. My two bit, if ever any of you go to Denmark, check out the SLT monitoring system in Focus Recording(www.focusrecording.dk) studios.

Active ATCs or PMCs. Take your pick.

Another way to ask the quesion is, which speaker reproduces the analog signal with the least amount of change? How would you know?? It's all relative isn't it? If you listen to two speakers on the same system, you may think that one of the speakers produces a voice more "accurately" but, how would you know?????

It's easy to define accuracy, hard (impossible) to achieve. Compare the waveform going in to the waveform coming out. The closer the output is to the input, the more accurate the speaker.

Many factors are involved in accuracy. All forms of distortion, harmonic, intermodulation, linear, phase, time. Not all forms of distortion are equally audible or important from a psychoacoustic standpoint. Other factors include, the stored energy of the drivers, the cabinet resonances, refraction, and interference patterns.

Room variations and anomolies must be eliminated for a true measurement. But, of course, the room comes into play for the user. This brings up another factor, power response. How does the speaker 'light up' the room, and how well does the ambient sound field correspond to the direct sound? Speakers can measure very well on axis, and create a miserable sound field that colors everything.

These factors also need to be prioritized. Suggested priority:

1) Linear response
2) Harmonic and IM distortion
3) Stored energy
4) Power response
5) Phase and time