Alan. Thanks for the response. I was hoping that you would weigh in.
The comments on another site that sparked this thread, were 'technically turored', but possibly misguided. Having several times tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to get some understanding of quantum physics, I have come away with an appreciation that we can measure things on an infinately smaller scale than we can ever hope to directly observe (or hear).
Thanks for the pointer to soundstage.com. I was there the other day, but did not bookmark, and could not find it in my browser history. Funny, I had looked at the curves the other day, but did not look closely at the off axis stuff and did not make much sense of it.
Looking again I can see that the M80 has very nice off axis response and compares favourably to the graphs I have seen on another site and of much more expensive B&W speakers.
Of couse, I already knew that, because my ears told me so when I auditions the M80.
The comment about people being able to hear differences of 1db in music came from an article on Audioholics by Mark Sanfilipo. Given his background I though it should be a reasonable proposition. Perhaps it is easier for someone such as Mark to hear these differences, because he has been making a living dealing with sound reproduction.
I have one other question. Would cabinet resonance show up in THD + N measurements of a speaker?
By the way, for anyone that is interested, I found a really cool site
here that does a great job of explaining sound reproduction and the things that effect what we hear.
I found the explanation on timbre particularly interesting, because I had been wondering what it is that makes some speakers sound more 'realistic' than others.
