Measuring Loudspeakers, Part One John Atkinson, November 1998
Measuring Loudspeakers, Part One John Atkinson, November 1998 This series of articles was initially written (in slightly different form), as a paper presented at the 103rd Audio Engineering Society Convention, New York, September 1997. The preprint, "Loudspeakers: What Measurements Can Tell Us—And What They Can't Tell Us!," AES Preprint 4608, is available from the AES, 60 East 42nd Street, Room 2520, New York, NY 10165- 0075. The AES internet site, offers a secure transaction page for credit-card orders. What's the point of measuring the performance of an audio component if what is owners do is listen to it? Of the 20 or so regularly published English-language consumer magazines on audio, only three routinely publish rigorous loudspeaker measurements: Hi-Fi News & Record Review in the UK; Audio and Stereophile in the US (footnote 1). It would seem that supporting a reviewer's subjective impression of how a loudspeaker sounds with measured data is an idea that is out of fashion these days. But without measuring a loudspeaker's performance, how can a "Golden Ears" reviewer avoid falling into error? I believe that it is the responsibility of any magazine that publishes judgments on audio components to fully describe their performance. And that cannot be done without measurements. For electronic components, measuring their effect on an input signal is relatively straightforward (though correlating those effects with perceived sound quality is not a job for the fainthearted). But for many decades, getting a true idea of how a loudspeaker performed was only possible using swept sinewaves in large, expensive anechoic chambers.
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