Great video. Thanks a LOT for posting this! Flat Frequency Response if/when measured correctly should matter THE MOST to those who want to hear the truth. 40 views and no comments in 7 hours time, that's a shame..... .

Tyll digs it

http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/important-words-floyd-toole

Hell yes I dig it. I had lunch with him and Sean Olive at Newport a couple years ago. He later gave Sean a signed copy of his book to give me. He's a charming dude, and both writes and speaks with a clarity that comes from long years of superb understanding of a topic. Thanks for posting it here, it's what prompted me to post on IF.

I actually spent the good part of a summer a fews years back reading the book. Great stuff. Like taking a college course. Wish Harman was as good to its customers as they were to Dr. Toole. He helped make great designs, unfortunately the suits cut corners. Great sounding but unreliable speakers resulted. All of my TOTL Infinity speakers have had issues. From defective mid-range drivers to amps in powered speakers going out. Shame, they sounded so good, until a few months out of warrenty. 


Thanks to Dr. Toole's work much better speaker designs have resulted. Hopefully more studies will be done on home/headphone interactions as have been done with concert halls as he suggests in the video.

Wish Harman was as good to its customers as they were to Dr. Toole.

Somehow I think Harmon puts these smart guys like Toole and Olive into an idiot room to limit the "damage" they may cause. You don't want these two guys telling the marketing guys, bean counters, and harried engineers that the stuff they make sounds like shit.

Very likely.
The question becomes: do they want to make great-sounding speakers or do they just want to make money?
The reserch can be looked at from several angles but one way to look at it, for example, is that the significance of something *actually* sounding good and something the *looks as though it does* can be made insignificanct to an inexperienced person providing you dress it up enough. Some of us would go ahead and sell the $700 systems at and be proud of the work and ecstatic with its value for the customers. Some of us would dress it up and sell it at $4000. Not dissimilar actually to Schiit and their products. I'm pretty sure that had anyone like McIntosh could somehow design something as good at the Yggy, there'd be another zero in the msrp.

I have no doubt you are right, having had dealings with the company that bought out McIntosh a few years back. IIRC they purchased 4 or 5 major companies about 2 or 3 years ago. Since then the prices have gone up and more than likely the quality and reliability have gone down. It isn't about the sound at all IMHO. It's all about the profit margin, and how big they can make it. They are leaving the middle/upper middle class customers behind and targeting upper income folks that can afford to spend $25,000 on a pre-amp, $35,000 on an amp and $75,000 on a pair of speakers. The average consumer gets to overpay for shitty sounding crap that breaks a few months out of warranty.  Just look at the stuff reviewed in Stereophile now. 20 years ago I could afford a lot of what they reviewed. Now, it's like reading some of the car magazines. That Lamborghini they are reviewing looks great. But how many people are going to go out and buy one? The difference being that the car has the specs to back up the price (sort of) but the audio gear often measures worse and has other sound issues than the most expensive gear that Schiit sells. But it is made with marble and weighs 500 lbs so it must be worth the price. Rip offs.