The home audio market has always kinda weirded me out. The showrooms tend to be a lot of leather couches and fancy lighting mixed with gold-plated digital cables, vacuum tubes, and snake oil. What gives? Is there a way to skip the faith-based part of it and just compare two different speakers/systems by their specs?
It seems like most other consumer electronics have relatively sensible specs that are useful for cross-comparison shopping. Monitors have brightness in nits and color coverage, contrast ratios, etc. If you want to buy a new TV, you can plug in a size and detailed specs and find the exact models that fit those criteria. If you want to buy a new digital camera, you can similarly filter by sensor size, megapixels, lens compatibility, etc. If you want a phone or computer, you can combine the specs of their different subsystems.
But when it comes to “how good something sounds”… how come we don’t have a similarly usable set of metrics (or maybe we do, and I just don’t know about them)? Beyond the wattage and the frequency response (which all seem to mostly just say 20 Hz - 20 kHz?), are there no other numbers that are useful in understanding which would sound objectively “better”, for some definition of better — let’s say to “most accurately reproduce a lossless digital recording”? Maybe a standard test panel of them, encompassing several different genres of music, TV shows, movies, games, etc.?
I’m not in the market for a new system, but just curious how it all works. I’m the (somewhat conflicted) owner of a Covid-era Sonos system. It held together my frayed psyche through the pandemic, for which I am eternally grateful, but then subsequent decisions made by the company lost a lot of customer trust, ultimately leading to the ouster of their CEO. This isn’t about that brand in particular, though. I was just wondering what, objectively, makes one speaker system sound better than another (or not). In my case, I got the Sonos because I wanted something that could play Spotify on its own, without needing a Bluetooth connection to a phone/laptop. At the time, that was relatively rare. The speakers sound “good” to my humble peasant ears, but not significantly better than, say, my $60 computer sound bar. It does have more bass, but that’s because it has a dedicated subwoofer. Compared to my old $150 Creative Labs gaming speakers from 30 years ago (which also had a sub), I think they sound pretty similar, even though the Sonos costs like 10x more. They’re definitely not 10x better, and in some ways are much worse (they were unreliable even before the app fiasco, and only got worse after that) — but that has nothing to do with its audio quality. Listening-wise, all I can say is that they generally sound “good”, but classical sounds a bit “dull”, and dialogue with any “s” sounds makes the person sound like a snake (I hear them hissing unnaturally, but nobody else I’ve asked can seem to hear it). But I’d be hard-pressed to actually measure or present any of those observations in an objective, numerical way. Is that even possible?
Anyway, if that system ever breaks (or Sonos goes bankrupt), I’d like to replace them with something much simpler. But is there actually an objective way to shop for them, some measurement of “sound quality per dollar”, beyond “feelings”?
I think I’d sooner step into a timeshare talk or used car dealership than an home audio shop… they all seem set up to fleece you by overwhelming you with mood and ambience rather than giving you the raw data. How would, say, professional sound engineers kitting out a stage for a band shop for speakers, instead? Is it possible to strip away the feel-good mumbo-jumbo and comparison shop by specs alone?
