Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Editor: Let me start by thanking Art, John, and Jim for their kindness and consideration in allowing me to take it back to them for a relisten, and for remeasuring, which involved quite a bit of inconvenience for both Art and John.

Art's analogy of different cakes for different people is one of the truisms of the sensory world, be it touch, smell, taste, sight, or sound. Aesthetics, by its very nature, is genetically bound to subjectivity.

We have designed these speakers around a set of criteria that we felt would bring its reproduction closest to our perception of the simulation of "liveness" (as we all know that it is impossible to recreate "live" on an audio system). And this is a combination of tonality, dynamics, transparency, and three-dimensional imaging, balanced very judiciously to give us what we are looking for. And to go back again to Art's cake analogy, some like it with more sugar, some with more nuts, some with more butter, and some with a firmer texture, and so on. It is virtually impossible to define one sound as the perfect sound because there are too many variables involved: the acoustics of the recording venue, the biases of the mastering engineer, the acoustics of the listening space, and most importantly the fact that all of us hear differently and therefore have our individual listening preferences.

As for the dip between 200Hz and 1000Hz in the measurements: We felt that having a flatter response in that area sounded to us like an over-prominent thickening of the lower midrange rather than richness. If one refers to the Fletcher Munson curves (or actually the more recent Robinson-Dadson curves), one will see that that is precisely an area where human hearing is more sensitive, the other being the 2kHz–4kHz region. We did not depress this second area, as we felt it was critical to adding "presence" to the sound.

Yes, we take all our final calls on tonal balance on the basis of our listening preferences rather than what the measurements tell us.

The one other element we give a lot of importance to in our design studio is that of the physical design of our products. We believe that in today's world, "performance" is not defined by any one criterion but is in fact a multisensory phenomenon.—Jacob George, Rethm