Amir over at AudioScienceReview has been testing speakers for a while with a state of the art Klippel system.
He includes monitors in his tests as well.


Here some of those tests. Some well known names measure suprprisingly bad.

ATC SCM19 - https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.14519/

PMC Twenty.21 - https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.14442/

Focal Aria 906: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.14085/

Ocean Way HR5: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.13925/

PResonus E5 XT: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.13436/

JBL 705P: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.11944/

Genelec 8341a: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.11652/

Adam S2V: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.11455/

Neumann KH80: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.11018/

Yamaha HS5: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.10967/


And you can even send him one of your monitors which he'll test for free and then return.
Would be good to have a bit more objective measurements around here to balance out all the subjective reviews

And here their master index of tested speakers and their preference rating: https://sites.google.com/view/speake...ratings-graphs

And again, if you live in the US and, have a speaker you'd like tested and can miss it for a short time then start a conversation with Amir to arrange a test! https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...s/add&to=amirm

Be careful of extrapolating data from one speaker to reflect on all speakers from a brand. A KH80 has little to do with the measurements of a KH310.
Only the foolish would think so.
(and that goes for active vs passive models too)

Agreed. Though it does allow comparison to manufacturers claimed response. In the case of the KH80 or for instance Genelec 8341a the measurements follow manufacturer specs closely. I'll personally take that as an indication that the specs for their other speakers are likely true as well.
Bigger surprise to some is perhaps how badly for instance those expensive PMC and ATC passives measure (though I've known about this for many years, also about several other of their speakers including actives, it doesn't seem to be common knowledge on this forum). Price surely isn't a good indicator of quality here.

There is nothing objective about those tests.
Amir Majidmehr, the owner of Audio Science Review, is a Harman dealer. He owns Madrona Digital, a Pacific Northwest Harman dealership. He bought these speakers to shit on them and sell his own wares. He has done the same with direct sale hifi gear to move cheap Aliexpress stuff. He has shown up on numerous gear forums to shill his wares and bad mouth products he doesn’t sell or have a hook up on with dodgy measurements that he claims are cold hard scientific truths. When he kept getting banned, he started his own. It eventually came out that he barely knew how to use his Audio Precision analyzer.

Anyone could have told him that the ATC SCM19 and SCM20 are bass light and mid forward. They are still much more reactive speakers than the rest. PMC would have told him themselves not to place their speakers directly in axis and to play with toe in. Notice how the flaws of the JBL LSR 705p go unmentioned? Amir doesn’t mention of the port issues, measurably off midrange, hornflare, and class d amps because he sells them. Some of the other posters there are even more disingenuous or zealots bashing gear they have never heard.

Well.. You may read anything you want into his subjective comments, but his Klippel measurements don't lie.
I personally tend to take his subjective comments with a grain of salt due to his listening conditions / untreated room and resulting preference for a certain off-axis slope.

As for the ATC speakers, those aren't the only bass-light ATC's as far as I know. And "reactive" speakers? What does that even mean?
And there's no real excuse for PMC as well, especially for PMC they've long been known to not be really flat (and as a speaker designer myself I can tell you not particularly well designed and even the whole TL concept not particularly well suited to flat fr studio monitors in general).
And there's nothing wrong with class-D amps because of their topology (Hypex NCore or Purifi Eigentakt will beat just about any class A and A/B amp), though I agree JBL seems to use particularly cheap and bad class D amps in their products. (and their deep waveguide isn't my cup of tea either)
But again, bash all his personal comments as much as you want, his measurements are fantastic and true and sure as hell beat all the subjective speaker A sounds like blabla posts here on GS (with all due respect).

edit: btw, I've been round ASR for some time now and don't see bad intent or personal gain behind his subjective comments. I personally think it's more the case that he sells what he likes (he is a big Harman research 'fanboy', which isn't completely undeserved I think for home hifi though likely somewhat less relevant for studio use).
And yes he does seem to get a liking from time to time for (deservedly) bashing bad measuring equipment, and so do I. But he gets even more excited when a piece of equipment measures exceptionally well, and so do I

As it happens, Guy Layfield (one of the main designers at Neumann) reached out to me and kindly offered the KH310 for review. I should be getting it soon and will test.

Next you are going to say the Moon Landing never happened, aliens have been abducting earthlings forever and earth is flat.

Personally I think the alien bit is true but that is for another topic!

Madrona is a custom integration company, not a retail hifi company. We have no showroom and the core of our business has nothing to do with stereo/hifi. We do consume a lot of Crown amps and such so out of abundance of transparency, I state that we have a business relationship with Harman.

The "cheap" stuff routinely outperforms the best of the best from more established companies. On DAC and headphone amplifier front, these products have reached a level of performance that no commercial analyzer can measure! As good as my Audio Precision APx555 analyzer is, it has higher noise level than these products!

Meanwhile a bunch of boutique audio companies produce substandard/poorly engineered products that have high noise, distortion, or both. And have the audacity to then charge a ton of money for the privilege.

Fortunately there are some companies who care such as Benchmark, RME, etc. so all is not lost.

Hopefully these smaller companies bring enough shame to major brands that they start to clean up their act and not rely on shills online to defend their poor execution.

I bought the first Audio Precision an analyzer when I joined Sony in 1989 soon after Audio Precision was started as a company. I then acquired the first one at Microsoft when I went there. All in all, my experience with Audio Precision spans 30 years. The notion that I don't know how to use it as absurd. Countless manufactures are now using my exact measurements for their testing. Indeed companies are purchasing Audio Precision analyzers to test their products so that they know with confidence that they will do well when I test them!

So please, for your own good stop believing conspiracy theories online. Spend a few minutes properly reading and understanding what I we are doing. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own money if not more as a service to the community to bring real truth of audio performance so people can be more informed in making purchase decisions. Only someone in the pocket of manufacturers would believe what you believe and try to create such FUD.

Great to see you here Amir
And looking forward to the KH310 measurements!
I've once owned its predecessor the K+H O300.
My subjective experience was that the bass sounded somewhat restricted and perhaps compressed (perhaps that woofer didn't do very well in such a small enclosure and pushed too low with steep highpass which kinda negates going closed in certain ways), and that there was some harshness around the (3.3kHz?) crossover freq which got in the way of transparancy there. But these may be solved in the KH310 which uses a different and longer throw woofer and lowers the crossover point (to 2kHz from memory?). When set up properly nearfield the O300 could sound still sound really impressive though, hope the KH310 even more so.

I look forward to testing it as well. I will definitely test for bass compression subjectively and objectively.

Madrona Digital, which you own, is a Harman dealer. You also own a website where you trash better performing products on the internet.

You spend money to inflate your own ego and try to establish some sort of influence over the market by shilling products that you have your hand in the pot in. Meanwhile you beg for money from the beginner members who follow you and look to you as a knowledgeable authority. You haven’t influenced the high end market, who know you are a joke.

You trash manufacturers products who don’t send you free samples while hand waving away drastic flaws of the ones you peddle. You frequently damage or are risk of damaging the products you test with your poor testing methodology. Not that you know how to test them. You had to be walked through how to use your Audio Precision Analyzer. Many other websites provide more honest and consistent measurements than Audio Science Review.

You’re a liar, charlatan, and a fraud.

Not happening. I have actually given poor reviews to Harman products that don't perform. Here is Arcam AVR (Harman owns the company): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.13071/


It starts with this due notice which you are hard pressed to see from other reviewers:

"Note: our company, Madrona Digital is a dealer for Harman which acquired Arcam a while back. I am also friends and a professional colleague with founder of Arcam, John Dawson (no idea if he is still with the company -- I hope not). So feel free to read as much bias into this review as you like."

But I go on to say this in the conclusions:

"Conclusions
A great analog engineer designed the amplifier in the Arcam AVR390 and did a great job both in measured performance and proper cooling. Sadly the digital section received no scrutiny and produced some of the worst results I have seen at its max output of just 1.3 volts. Given the legacy of Arcam and marketing material for the product/brand, this is truly shameful performance.

Needless to say, as a package I cannot recommend the ARCAM AVR390. Maybe wait a few years until they are given away for nothing and buy it for its amplifiers and run them in direct mode."

Indeed reviews like this have hugely damaged my personal and professional relationship with Harman. It is so bad that any Harman product I need to test regardless of price, I have to buy myself.

But it is worth it: I am here to be an advocate of consumers. I am going to tell the truth through objective measurements which manufacturers can dispute with their own if they like.

If a company wants to do well, all they have to do is run such tests and publish good results themselves. To the extent they don't even bother running such tests and I am the one doing them, and the results are disappointing, they are going to see my harsh language on that.

That their defenders like you cry about that is neither here, nor there. I am not here to make you feel good about whatever you have bought that doesn't do well.

Wow.. You must be a special kind of idiot

I have no need for manufacturers to send me anything. I have a HUGE backlog of gear that members either buy new and drop ship to me, or send me what they have. In this model, there is no obligation to do good for the company so they send you more gear.

Of course companies that build well engineered products do send me their gear and I appreciate that. The list here is long and includes Benchmark, RME, Neumann, Adam, Schiit, Denon/Marantz, etc.

Schiit is actually a very good example. They were building truly subpar gear despite creating a reputation otherwise. Online "reviewers" were posting measurements that clearly showed problems yet would conclude with "excellent results." Well, I told the truth.

Fast forward a year or two later and Schiit purchased the same analyzer I have and started to produce superbly measuring products, garnering my strong recommendation.

As to hand waving, that is the only thing we see from you. Not one specific example of anything you say. Just empty accusations meant to defend manufacturers that produce poor products at the expense of consumers.

WOW! I have ventured into the high-end subforum in ages, but I'm glad I did today. It's official, Audio Science Review is my next favourite stop after Gearslutz, especially Amir's tests. Thank you so much for this.

Amir, is it possible for you to get your hands on the Dynaudio LYD 48 for testing? Those are the monitors I'm really looking to purchase, and would love to see some in-depth information and tests on them. Thank you so much for all your hard work. I was actually looking at those Oceanway monitors, but have since changed my mind.

Thanks for the kind words. Much appreciated. I have a Lyd 5 in for review. Hopefully that is a good indication of the line overall.

Your aggressive comments tell more about yourself than Amirm. If anyone seems to have misplaced ego or even a hidden agenda in this thread it's you.

Would, by any chance, your own personal monitors happen to be in Amirm's list of disappointing (and overpriced) speakers ?

Well I'll be sure to check that review our when it's published. The entire LYD line follows more or less the same production ethos, methods and assembly, so it should be a very good indicator of what to expect for LYD 48s. Thanks again!

I would highly doubt a 2 way is reflective of a 3 way design.
Even if 2 out of 3 drivers were the same, just the change is crossover and front baffle configuration would have a huge effect.

I understand it won't be a 1-to-1 comparison, but I feel that the quality should transfer across the range. I know this isn't always the case, but I think Dynaudio has pretty high standards, although that in itself doesn't really say much. But I'm hoping for the best.

Tell us how you really feel?

Bold statements, especially coming from someone that hides their identity.

Surely objective measurements of one specific speaker or piece of gear will all come out the same no matter where or by whom they are done?

Looking at the page for the JBL LSR705 I can see quite a major difference between Harman’s own published measurements and those done on ASR.
It’s roughly 5db of deviance between the two.

The thorough specifications of the Genelec 8351a's was a significant factor in my purchasing decision. They have not disappointed. I was glad that Sound on Sound published a guide on speaker specifications a few months ago. The research that JBL/Harmon and others have done on human perception, audibility and other related disciplines is very, very well done and fully supports the types of measurements Genelec publishes and the types in the linked articles in this thread.

This is a good effort. Physical transducers are the most colored thing in any chain. Mic's and speakers - they are the arbiter of pretty much everything else. And strangely, a place that both are historically thinly specified.

It isn't about costing a lot. The original Mackie 824's measured exceptionally well. I used them for 10 years, in untuned and then finally tuned rooms. When I upgraded to the Genelecs, I got a lot better imaging, spaciousness, detail, etc. The sweet spot is bigger, and more, but the measured frequency response in room was virtually identical. And it should be - the room and treatment didn't change, so the same desk reflections, modes, etc. are still present.

If the whole industry embraced full specifications, the quality rise in monitoring would be shocking.

Yaaaaaaaa...
Pretty skeptical of this methodology...


(From the scm19 review)

Edit: to be clear: I haven’t researched this system, but I am skeptical of any system which claims to be able to measure ‘anywhere’ and be more accurate than an anechoic chamber ‘using advanced mathematics to eliminate the influence of the room’
It sounds a bit like attempting to judge the quality of an egg by unbaking it from a cake

the only thing which matters is how monitors are measuring in YOUR own rooms:

speaker performance to a large degree depends on the specific room and on their positioning...

A friend of mine who up until recently worked as a system tech and dealt directly with Harman said exactly the same thing.

On one hand I think it's good to try and get some kind of understanding of how these various products we're using actually measure, but furthermore I really think they must be taken with a pinch of salt.

The measurements of the SCM19 have very, very little in common with the measurements I've done of my SCM20s (which is to be expected, they're actually almost entirely different speakers), and the same with the Resolution Mag measurements of SCM25s floating around.

The Klippel near-field-scanner is a very expensive (>$100k) state of the art measurement system that is quickly becoming the standard in the industry, replacing actual anechoic chambers for this intended use. Having gone over some of the measurements it seems there is excellent correlation with some known standards such as Genelec and Neumann.

Before wading into this one I think it's important to establish ANY financial links one may have. I don't sell new gear or review any gear. I have no ties whatsoever to any audio gear manufacturer. The few pieces of used audio gear I sell in a year I've used myself and go out of my way to allow auditioning of that gear before sale. If it's a non-local sale and they can't come to me I still furnish everything I know about it. I do this because I buy used gear and want to know as much as I can before I buy it (remember the Golden Rule). It's ALWAYS buyer beware though and best practice is to be skeptical.

Now the ONLY apples to apples test for speakers is via independent certified testing labs with anechoic chamber via repeatable international testing standards and methodology. We know this is acurate in that two independent labs half way across the world will produce the same results with the same exact speaker. Their livelyhoods and reputation depend on strick adherance to extremely precise standards and methodology. It's very expensive for any product tested in an independent certified lab but you get a no bullsh*t result. Many manufacturers instead just spend more on marketing.

Now I have not gone to the OP's site or looked at any of his materials however just based on what he claims in this thread alone you should be extremely skeptical. The problem with the OP's testing method is that outside of an anechoic chamber, ANY testing of a speaker is realy just testing the INTERACTION BETWEEN a speaker's performance, the room's acoustics, the room's construction, the speaker and test mic's positioning, all other items in the room and their construction and positioning, along with a host of other things interacting if you want to get real technical like height above sea level, tempature, and humidity level for determining air density (you are measuring sound moving through air so the air itself is a factor). Long story short, it's a crapload of variables and anyone who has moved a speaker a few inches or even just moved a speaker a few degrees in it's same position and heard different results knows this to be true. Change a variable and you get different results.

To think that a computer program can account for the all of those variables and deliver consistant results regardless of positioning as the OP claims is a joke. What if the speaker or mic is set up in a frequency null or resonant peak? While analytical computer programs can help set up sound systems it's still broad strokes at best because of the huge amount of variables effecting the interaction we hear at any given postion. Those who do live sound know that even when sound systems are aided by computers, as soon as a space fills with people the acoustics change and thus the sound system interacts and delivers a different response. Once those people are there a bit and the tempature rises again the interaction is changed and the sound system response changes.

We have plenty of threads here on how to position speakers in your space for best response and it takes hours of experimentation (I've posted info in a number of them). We also have threads on best ways to audition speakers and the obvious pitfalls due to variables and their interaction.

I'm not believing a computer app can eliminate enough variables and now allow apples to apples testing of speakers outside an anechoic chamber. Frankly you would probably get more useful info testing outside with a free acoustics computer app and $100 test mic by eliminating more (but not all) variables.

Clearly you have no idea what the Klippel nearfield-scanner is. This is not some toy. It is a professional grade, state-of-the-art, measurement system. Please inform yourself.

Regardless of buzzwords phrases like "state of the art" or cost of a testing device (in this case likely cheaper than testing a line of speakers in a certified independent lab), this device is still testing an INTERACTION and that interaction is controlled by a large number of variables of which any computer app would be unlikely to acurately account for. This testing device will not tell you how a speaker will perform in your particular space with a given position.

If you google the Klippel, on the first page of links is a DYI audio forum discussion that over 51 pages gets into it's nuts and bolts, revealing it's limitations and pitfalls. Again it's the amount and type of variables effecting the INTERACTION we hear that is the biggest factor. While Klippel is trying to eliminate room reflections via nearfield measurement and mathmatics (at least up to 1khz where other tricks are employed), there are still limits. When you put a speaker in a real studio and especially at greater than nearfield usage then your particular variables and their interaction is where the rubber meets the road.