Fred,
I know Mark Sanfilipo and he has visited Axiom, but he has no background in the NRC research and double-blind listening program that began with Floyd Toole, past president of the Audio Engineering Society world-wide. Rather than repeat myself, you can read in detail about this program in the Axiom articles archive:
http://www.axiomaudio.com/NRC.html http://www.axiomaudio.com/frequencyresponse.htmlCabinet resonances in well-designed speakers like the M80s are suppressed to a degree that they are not a source of audible coloration. Yes, if they were significant, they would cause measurable aberrations in the frequency response curves.
If Mark had participated, as I have, in over 25 years of editing AV magazines in Toronto and New York and doing double-blind tests of loudspeakers from Canada, the USA, England, etc., he wouldn't say: "The suggestion is that these fluctuations, along with cabinet resonance, (hopelessly) colour the sound of the speaker."
The best of modern speakers like the M80 v2s and some others are remarkably natural and uncolored, capable of thrilling musical reproduction that is extremely convincing when the source recording is of high quality.
Moreover, what is startling and gratifying about the NRC research is that realistic sound reproduction and smooth frequency response on and off-axis does not correlate with loudspeaker price. I still have data from comparisons at the NRC between some top speakers from Axiom, PSB, Energy Veritas, Snell, and Paradigm Studio Reference vs. speakers up to $7,000 per pair from B&W, Kef, Thiel, etc. that lost out in the double-blind tests to speakers that were a fraction of the prices of the "high-end" brands.
In terms of the 1-dB differences, yes, our brains and ears are indeed sensitive to such differences, which is why casual comparisons of speakers are so flawed when the playback levels of two different speakers are not adjusted so there is less than 1 dB difference. But you won't be aware of such small volume differences in casual comparisons and you'll often choose the imperceptibly louder speaker as sounding "better." It's a trick of salesmen in stores to slightly increase the volume of the models they want the customer to purchase.
Hope this helps in your understanding.
Regards,
Alan Lofft
