ABSTRACT
A sound reproduction system can have no greater fault than impaired speech intelligibility. Lyrics in songs lose their meaning, movie plots are confusing, and the evening news . . . well. In the audio community, it is popular to claim that refl ected sounds within small listening rooms contribute to degraded dialog intelligibility. The concept has an instinctive “rightness,” and it has probably been good for the acoustical materials industry. However, as with several perceptual phenomena, when they are rigorously examined, the results are not quite as expected. This is another such case.
