The Importance of Speaker Specifications: What They Mean and Why They Matter (1 Viewer)

[SJeans123]

When shopping for speakers, you’ll certainly encounter a huge range of technical specifications.
Frequency response, sensitivity, impedance, and so on, go a long way to explain how a speaker will sound, how much power it requires, and how well it’ll work with your other audio components.

However, making sense of them all together is tricky. Some mean more than others. Some are a need-to-know. Others are more marketing-speak.

Here, we’ve broken down all the key loudspeaker specifications anyone needs to know, explaining what they mean and how they relate to your listening experience.

By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how to use specs to choose the right system.

Frequency Response​

First up, frequency response. This tells you the range of frequencies a speaker can reproduce, from the lowest bass notes to the highest treble tones.

It’s expressed as a range extending from 20Hz to 20kHz (it may extend further, but this is the important bit of the range), representing the limits of human hearing. We can generally perceive sounds from about 20 Hz (very low bass) up to around 20,000 Hz (very high treble).

However, it’s important to note that our sensitivity to frequencies varies. We’re most sensitive to sounds in the midrange (around 1kHz-5kHz), which is where vocals and most instruments reside. Our perception of bass and treble frequencies is less acute, especially at the extremes of the audible spectrum.

So, while a speaker with a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz can theoretically reproduce the entire range of human hearing, the audibility and impact of frequencies at the edges of this range will be less pronounced.

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[John Dirk]

This is an excellent and timely summary I'd recommend to anyone in the market for speakers or subs. Thanks, Sam!

 

[Bartman]

Measurements are more important than specifications. I recommend Erin's Audio Corner on YT for honest assessments & measurements.

 

[Nathan_H]

Measurements are more important than specifications. I recommend Erin's Audio Corner on YT for honest assessments & measurements.

Yep! And in that respect, the SVS (who sponsored that "article") are middling, at best.

This is not just opinion. This is based on double blind listening tests, conducted in controlled scientific situations, reported in peer reviewed journals, over multiple decades.

Sound Quality: What Speakers Am I Most Likely to Like?

Speaker measurements and science cannot tell you what speakers to buy.

However, getting lots of humans listening to speakers, and seeing if they agree regarding which sound better, would be a useful data point to help narrow down the list of candidates for audition and purchase. Science can help with that.

You can have thousands of people listen to the same few dozen speakers in the same room -- all set up correctly -- without the listeners and the staff having any knowledge of which speaker is which, what it costs, what technology is being used, and so on.^^^

Then, if a consensus emerges from all those listening sessions regarding which speakers sound better than the other speakers, that might help you focus auditions and listening sessions on those preferred speakers.

The good news? Experts have been running those kinds of listening tests for decades, and the results have been very consistent. The same speakers tend to be preferred by most people, both expert listeners and novices. So, you can look up the results of those tests and audition the speakers that won those listening tests. Since most people prefer those speakers, odds are good you too will prefer those speakers, so why not start your shopping there?

Of course, not every speaker has been tested that way. So can we make use of those tests to help us get a sense of which untested speaker might also be winners?

Could we measure the performance of the speakers in a large number of ways, and see if the speakers that people like all happen to share some particular, measurablecharacteristics?

That way, instead of only having a list of some specific speakers we have tested, are we also able to predict whether other speakers, that we haven't had everyone listen to, might also be preferred by most listeners?

It turns out, we can measure the speakers people like, and then predict, based on measurements of other speakers, what most people are likely to prefer even if the new speaker wasn't in one of the listening tests!

Researchers have repeatedly validated those predictions, by conducting actual listening tests and comparisons between speakers, and seeing whether the predicted preference closely matches that actual preference of listeners. Spoiler alert: It tracks very very closely.

What does that mean? That means we can accurately predict which speakers most people will prefer -- without even listening to them, simply based on how those speakers measure.

That does not mean you should buy speakers just based on measurements.

But it does mean you are likely to end up with speakers you are more likely to like if you start your shopping with models that measure well (ie, similarly to the speakers that large groups of people prefer). To oversimplify, those speakers that people prefer tend to have flat on axis frequency response, consistent off axis dispersion, and, all other things being equal, have more bass extension. (The latter aspect becomes much less significant in a system with subwoofers, of course.)

So, where do I find these measurements?

Well, the Consumer Electronics Organization created a specification years ago about how to conduct those tests called CEA 2034 (sometimes called a "spinorama" since measurements are taken all around the speaker).

More and more, serious speaker manufacturers are releasing this data.

And there are several online publications that do these measurements on a wide variety of speakers. Audio Science Review, Erin's Audio Corner, and others publish their data and there is a nice compendium of measurements from many sources, here: Spinorama dot org





Amir over at Audio Science Review has some good videos about how to use these data, as does Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner (and his YouTube channel is the most prolific and detailed on this topic).

The TLDR summary of how to read this data?

Given the same bass extension, the more linear (not flat, but something in a straight line) the SOUND POWER curve is, the more likely the speaker will be preferred by most listeners. (This line is a combination of factors like on and off axis response…..the two things that matter most in speaker preference testing.)




It sounds too simple to be true, but again and again, when both expert and novice listeners are asked to rank order speakers in terms of what sounds best to them, in blind tests, nearly 90 percent of the time, they rank things in the same fashion.....and it correlates with what the sound power looks like (the linearity and consistency of on and off axis sound, the more neutral the better).

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Don't get me wrong, specifications are also VERY helpful. This is particularly true for power handling / output capability, which is ALSO very important:

Selecting Speakers Should be Easy, Part Two

Your room size and seating distance influence what speakers (paired with what amplification) will have enough output to work for you.

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