On January 29, 2021 at 19:02, BobL said...
As far as preference versus reference I think it is time. I have a theory I call the Mom's spaghetti rule. Everybody's mom (grandma, etc.) makes the best spaghetti. Meaning everyone has their own reference.
You don't like noodles with Ketchup? Yeesh! The crap some people try to pass off as food....I remember going to friends' houses for lunch or dinner as a kid and being served some mess they thought was amazing. Ya just can't say anything about it, either.
If you mostly only listen to music in the car than that is your reference. If you mostly use ear buds that is your reference. You know what music sounds like for your reference and that is set how you prefer. If your reference has very boomy, bloated bass when you hear accurate bass you think it is anemic. However, if a person listen to accurate music for a while and then goes back to their old reference they then realize that it was boomy and bloated.
When I did car audio, a guy came in with a Pontiac GTA (Grand Trans Am) after someone stole the audio system. The sales guys had a bad habit of selling equipment that would be difficult to install in some cars and as usual, that was the case with this one. He told the guy we could build a bandpass box for the 12" Infinity Kappa subs, which needed a fairly large box. Being a Trans Am, it didn't have room for a big box and the available space was irregularly-shaped, but I measured and modeled the box, finally arriving at a decent response, with some semi-educated guesswork WRT the way it would interact with the car's interior. Then, there was the issue of the door panels that needed to be cut and custom mounts made because the panels weren't flat and the guy didn't want holes in the door panels (the sales guy was clearly not listening). That left 4x6 in the dash, 6x9 mid-bass drivers in the rear pillars, the two subs and the electronics. This car was to be entered in an IASCA event that our company was sponsoring and it too place at our store- he entered and in the RTA section, it scored 37 out of 40 points. He absolutely hated the sound of the bass, so he bought an MTX demo CD, went to a remote part of the parking lot and proceeded to blow the shyte out of the woofers. Turns out, the original "subs" were Orion woofers, mounted in a piece of particle board and screwed down, with leaks around the edges.
Toole mentioned this in his book and the reason they decided to use trained listeners. They found that untrained listeners came to the same conclusion but took them longer to get to that conclusion. I don't think most people when demoing speakers in the showroom spend enough time. It is why accurate speakers often do not do sell as well in many showrooms. I KNOW some companies do research with the public with preferences with simulating the amount of time they would likely do a demo and how quickly they would switch between speakers. Not all that research is made public. I do give Kudos to Harman for making their research public.
In the end for any speaker company it is about sales and that is where a lot of research is directed.
Some people don't know what they're supposed to listen for, either. Others have a friend who's an 'expert', too- what a PITA that is. Another huge problem is the fact that the speakers WILL NOT sound the same at home and unless someone is installing the equipment for them, chances are good that the speakers will be in the worst possible locations.
