Those of you who believe measurements aren't the whole story, do you have a hypothesis why that is?

[cany89]

what measurement will accurately tell me how well bass below 200 hz will integrate in my room.

You can buy a calibrated measurement mic (like umik-1) and run the simplest test possible to get an in-room response of your speakers. It will tell you exactly how well bass is below 200 Hz will integrate and more. (Although I believe you are talking about anechoic chamber measurements, I still wanted to write this)

Hifi tech jumped in - let's say in the last 10 years - so much that old chaps just couldn't keep up and still want to sell and use old tech for a hefty price.

 

[ahofer]

You can buy a calibrated measurement mic (like umik-1) and run the simplest test possible to get an in-room response of your speakers.

Silly. You just have to have golden ears and listen to a speaker made by the same manufacturer at the store or someone else's house.

 

[lashto]

You need to be -100db or more IMO.

IME the sensitivity the ear has to the higher orders is grossly downplayed by the industry and its incantations of 'negligible distortion' are often false. Like many things in life, its more complex than that. To me the missing link is understanding how the ear/brain system perceives sound; what's important and what is not (and so applying engineering to take advantage of that). A lot of that has only been found out in the last 30 years or so; IMO not enough of that understanding is applied when we do the measurements;

thanks for this post, for a moment I thought I was the only ASR member who won't bet on -1xx THD being inaudible

distortion vs frequency is a good step in the right direction due to that pesky Gain Bandwidth Product thing.

Can you clarify this a bit?
Another (very 'popular') oppinion of mine is that a distortion vs. frequency graph that goes downwards may sound kinda wrong & could be audible .. even at very low levels of THD.
Even more so about a distortion vs. power graph that goes downwards.