And what happens with room effects.
Watching my M80 fund grow is almost as fun as watching grass grow (well, ok, it is a little more fun),so I'm bored.
In my never ending quest to understand what the heck some people are talking about, I am wondering what sort of effect smaller fluctuations in frequency response, up to +-3db, have on the sound of a speaker.
This comes from a discussion on another board where the assertion was made that most speakers are mediocre (including M80s, can you believe it
) because they do not have a ruler flat frequency response and have cabinet resonance. The suggestion is that these fluctuations, along with cabinet resonance, (hopelessly) colour the sound of the speaker.
This prompted me to go back and look at the graphs for a bunch of speakers including the M80. It seems that there are some small but notable dips and rises in the curve for the M80: one dip being in the 100Hz range and a general rise above about 11kHz
When I say notable, I mean that they stand out visually on the graph, not that they are large. If I had to guess, (and I do because the graphs are not that noticable) I would say the spread between the lowest and the highest might reach 5 or 6 db.
It is also worth while to note that Debbie at Axiom suggested that the cutoff during testing of each speaker is about +- 2db.
Compare that to a speaker, Ascends I think it is, (and not very expensive at that) which appear to have a very uncommonly flat graph that looks like +-1 to 2 db.
Will such small differences between speakers noticably colour the sound?
Can/will room effects accentate those differences to noticable levels?
How does cabinet resonance fit in here and how much effect can it have?
To put this in perspective, the commentor believes that there are only a handfull of speakers ever made that meet his lofty expectations; all of them being well above my budget.
