ABSTRACT
The three components—loudspeaker, room and listener—comprise a system, functioning together. Certain characteristics of loudspeaker design appear to be able to improve the delivery of good sound in a variety of rooms. When designing loudspeaker crossovers and arrays where the outputs from multiple drivers must acoustically sum in an orderly manner. Properly designed electronic equalization can address specific resonances and attenuate them, making active loudspeakers, or loudspeakers with dedicated digital electronics, distinctly advantageous. Relocating the woofers of tall loudspeakers to be closer to the axis of rotation can yield more precise data at low frequencies, which then can be spliced to the mid-/high-frequency data. All of the high-scoring loudspeakers were described as having flattish spectra, a trend that matches the flattish on-axis/listening window curves for all of the corresponding anechoic measurements. The conclusion is that it is strongly advantageous to begin with comprehensive high-resolution anechoic data from which problems in a loudspeaker can be reliably anticipated.
