A lot of the Audiophile’s Guide needs a facelift - most especially the equipment racks and turntables, not to mention the categories that are still empty.

But the Speaker category is now down to 8 speaker manufacturers, and if it continues in the current direction it will be down to 6 the next time I get near it with the delete key…And one can forsee a future in which the last standing manufacturer gets the axe - all because the current approach is flawed in a number of ways:

It does not take into account that some speakers from a manufacturer are really much better than other speakers from the same manufacturer

It does not take into acount the different goals for a system, each separate goal possibly arriving at a different ‘best’ speaker.

It does not take into account room size and other possible constraints that affect the choice of ‘best speaker’

The new format will try to take these things into account by:

Listing speakers instead of just manufacturers

Adding categories to represent the different goals systems (people) have like ‘Impressive’, ‘Emotional’ etc.

Taking into account small, medium and large room sizes

Not sure how we are going to organize all this data yet. But we are working on it.

Then we can add manufacturers like Sonus Faber and MBL to the list of best speakers - as they do have privilaged places in the speaker world - with respect to very specific sonic goals - just not at the top of best of the ultimate.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 5:46 pm and is filed under High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.