The Knight of the Loud Speaker - Dr. Floyd Toole

It's a fact.

Almost every loudspeaker you ever heard is most likely total rubbish according to Dr. Floyd Toole, a pre-eminent acoustical and psychoacoustical researcher who is possibly the most learned loudspeaker expert in the World.

His presentation at the January 2010 AES meeting at Microsoft Studios in Redmond helped peel back the layers of an industry tasked with doing nothing but produce products designed to convey the sound of the original recording to the owners ears.

Unfortunately most speakers like to sing along...out of tune.

You remember that teak monolith with the yellow eye on top that you drooled over in the pro-audio shop last week?

Rubbish.

How about the mighty Awfultone Auratone, a so-called reference speaker used by virtually every studio engineer worth his or her salt in almost every TV, Radio and Movie production facility anywhere around the globe from time in memorial?

Rubbish.

After putting hundreds of loudspeakers through exhaustive tests in laboratory conditions, taking measurements from up to seventy points in space at various axis around the subject, and countless blind listening sessions conducted by highly trained human beings with excellent hearing, it turns out that your loudspeakers are most likely about as good at conveying what the original recording sounded like as a baby monitor.

Well maybe not quite that bad.

The point here is that after looking at the usual +/- 3dB frequency range stuff, or the whatever to whatever numbers and the etc etc blah blah on the back of the speakers you like the look of (you know, the ones that are all rounded and tech looking with the obligatory yellow speaker cone and rubberized mesh empty coffee cup holder in the back) you might be convinced that you have a decent pair of speakers in your shopping trolley.

Unfortunately all those fancy number are nothing but marketing department smoke and mirrors. It's like choosing which airline to fly on based on which airline flies higher. It's meaningless gobbleygook designed to make you think it actually means something.

So how do we find out, definitively and without any doubt, which loudspeakers are good at replicating the sound of the source recording?

We use SCIENCE!

Next...interpreting the raw data.