One of my 22 year-old B&W 804s recently lost a voice coil, so I am using my KEF LS50s in my media room, until I decide on a permanent replacement. After buying, filling, and Dynamat-ing a pair of Monoprice Monolith stands, I was ready to position and measure this past weekend. I measured left, right, and stereo from the listening position using REW and the MMM. To check my work, I generated a stereo PEQ filter, loaded it into Equalizer APO, and measured the stereo results. Here is that measurement with psychoacoustic smoothing against my target:
I think this somewhat illustrates why people love LS50s despite their middling Olive score. When positioned properly in a room and driven with decent amplification, they can sound much bigger than their anechoic measurements--especially with a little EQ.
In one listening pathway, I will be using 7 bands of PEQ per channel in my Yamaha AVR's manual EQ. The frequencies and Qs will have to be adjusted, as its PEQ has fixed frequency and Q steps. I can usually get very close, however. Good enough for TV and movies.
My other listening pathway includes a miniDSP OpenDRC-DI between the streamer and DAC. It has 6 bands of PEQ per channel and will also receive custom filters per side.
The results of both pathways should look very similar to the above, possibly slightly better, but those pathways are much more difficult to measure.
Here is the before and after comparison with variable smoothing:
No subs were included in these measurements, although I have two SVS SB2000 subs. That's a fight for a different day.