Workshop #3
Loudspeaker Listening Comparison

Loudspeaker auditioning is always a hot topic, but few have ever been able to participate in a real-time, level-matched comparison of two speaker systems driven by the same power amplifier. Level matching is critical to a proper listening test where different speakers are being compared. Unfortunately, simple level matching schemes employing L-pads introduce impedance-dependent colorations because they kill the amplifier damping factor. A line-level matching scheme was implemented for these listening tests that does not introduce those degradations. This listening comparison was intended to demonstrate how hard it is to determine what sounds "right", and to illustrate how one speaker can make the other sound "wrong". Unfortunately, time constraints involving system reconfiguration forced us to abandon this aspect of the workshop (we are working on a more agile switching arrangement that will mitigate this problem).

This workshop instead focused on a presentation on audition music with discussion of what to listen for and what kind of music works. Peter Smith, a long-time speaker designer, presented this workshop. Peter wrote the recent article describing his "NeoNoir" loudspeaker in AudioXpress.