11-Jan-2016, 09:22
As others have written, bass is mainly effected by the room, and the position of the speakers in it. The speaker contribution is inherent in the design and only speakers with a gentle but steady bass rolloff tend to be non-boomy near a wall. That tends to favour sealed box over reflex designs.
At the other end of the frequency range the drive units beam over a narrower and narrower angle as the frequency increases. Toe-in has a big effect on whether the tweeter (the most directional of all) is pointing at you or not. When fired straight down the room it is likely that you are missing a considerable amount of the overtones if the speakers are designed with a flat response. There are a few speakers about with a significant steady rise in tweeter response which may compensate for this when not pointing at the listener. Matthew's graph is typical of what one would expect. I am only slightly surprised he did not hear a difference, because actually the difference in his is only really significant in the last audible octave (10kHz to 20kHz) and this octave contains no fundamental notes from any non-percussion instrument iirc, just overtones.
Also, because of the ear's different sensitivity to different frequencies, these frequencies need to be pretty loud to be heard at all anyway so on a lot of music one would not expect an audible difference due to this.
At the other end of the frequency range the drive units beam over a narrower and narrower angle as the frequency increases. Toe-in has a big effect on whether the tweeter (the most directional of all) is pointing at you or not. When fired straight down the room it is likely that you are missing a considerable amount of the overtones if the speakers are designed with a flat response. There are a few speakers about with a significant steady rise in tweeter response which may compensate for this when not pointing at the listener. Matthew's graph is typical of what one would expect. I am only slightly surprised he did not hear a difference, because actually the difference in his is only really significant in the last audible octave (10kHz to 20kHz) and this octave contains no fundamental notes from any non-percussion instrument iirc, just overtones.
Also, because of the ear's different sensitivity to different frequencies, these frequencies need to be pretty loud to be heard at all anyway so on a lot of music one would not expect an audible difference due to this.
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