SO, I've been wanting to show all of you how I measure loudspeakers in a way that makes sense to the way our mind works, as opposed to an engineer with two pocket protectors and 41 pens. This came about during the process of measuring the Big Betsy and BBJ open baffle speakers. Of course first I measure the speaker with a gated response and then measure the speaker in room from the listening position which is to say measuring the room and the speaker and then look at it and compare it with other speakers measured in the same space and waste hours learning nothing.
Sure you can identify some room/speaker issues and work on them, but I'm talking about looking at a frequency response chart, like the two Dank posted earlier and realizing that they tell you virtually nothing. Just some feel good graphs to publish with no clue what the speaker sounds like.
Myself, I don't care what the speaker sound sounds like, I am in a room where a loudspeaker is placed and therefor a part of. I want to see on a graph what I am hearing, and I want to see it in real time, and in a way that makes sense with concrete numbers I can work from. I want to see what
music measures like in my room, not impulse response or pink noise or frequency sweeps.
This is how I do that while listening to music.... and measuring loudspeakers while I am listening to them.
Just watch the video and study the peak notes which are tracked, and you will see what frequencies are responsible for the sounds you hear.
https://decware.wistia.com/medias/bcsykv14kyWhen I am really trying to digest something sometimes I will record it with this device, and then play it back over and over as I watch it. I'm pretty sure I have more hours staring at this real time graphic as I listen than I would care to admit over the past many years. Easily 100's of hours. You speculate where you think sounds live and you are wrong. You think you need response to 40K and < 20Hz, you are wrong. What you need is the correct tilt for a given room, which is perfectly illustrated in this video. See, high frequencies operate by different rules than low frequencies therefor to the human ear, they need not be as loud and should not be as loud.
For those of you who are watching the video multiple times, you might notice that near the end of the video the lowest note you hear drops way deep yet the graph reads around 60+ Hz or so...
Let me say it again.
The loudest, lowest note in the video by the graph measures over 60Hz despite being obviously lower sounding than the 49Hz we see reoccurring throughout the video.
What this is telling you is that the low bass note is a seed, and the harmonic is the amplifier that determines how mean and how loud the seed will sound. My guess is that the low note we hear is probably 32Hz but because it is perhaps 6db or more lower in amplitude than the over 60Hz harmonic, we don't see it on the graph.
But, when we look at a speakers frequency response we assume that if we want to hear 32Hz sound as loud as 60Hz, the line must be flat between those two points which is to say the -3B point must be well below 32 Hz. How easily fooled we are, and how little we actually know.
Steve