Darren Myers and I were having one of those classic water cooler conversations (even though we don’t have a water cooler).
We were speaking about the upcoming FR20 loudspeaker Chris and Darren are working on voicing. Darren said something to me that really rang true.
“A half or even a 1dB change between the midrange and tweeter wouldn’t raise an eyebrow when viewed on a frequency response graph, but boy does that small change make a mountain of a difference in how the speaker sounds.”
How true. Relatively small changes in a speaker’s crossover response have major impacts on its performance—impacts that I would defy anyone to correctly identify from merely looking at a frequency response graph.
Here’s the thing. When an engineer looks at small baubles of change in a measurement not much can be determined in that vacuum. Only after hearing something suspicious in a specific area do those measurements help. For example, if we heard a problem area around the midrange tweeter crossover frequency we could look at those measurements and begin to make some sense of what we were seeing.
Hearing helps us pinpoint where it is to look for problems. Once identified, we can shave a little off the top and make magic.
