As you probably know Roy Allison passed away recently. David Moran did an excellent piece on Roy as both a speaker designer and person. One of the things that was most interesting to me was one of Roy's statements about reproduction flatness that is shown below. Very smart cookie that Roy Allison.
Tom
Ideally every element in the reproduction chain should be flat, with deviations from flatness (when desired) controllable by the user. This should include loudspeakers too, of course. But even if it were practical to make such loudspeaker systems at reasonable prices — which it is not — what could be done about the hundreds of millions of loudspeakers in use now, all of which do have rolled-off high-frequency power output?
The answer is that you continue to make records that sound properly balanced when played on these loudspeaker systems, or you won't sell records. Thus records will continue to have inherently a ‘brighter’ balance than is intended by the recording engineer to be actually heard. That will be true of ‘concert’ recordings, jazz and chamber recordings, and even ambience-type four-channel recordings. Playing such records at home on truly flat loudspeaker systems will produce a sound considerably brighter than the producer had in mind.
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