Hi
Protocol is an important part of measuring or comparing anything.
As Ivan said “When the "rules" change mid stream, it makes it a little unfair to the earlier "competitors". In this case, he refers to the request to “crank it up” which came right after our boxes had been auditioned.
This and the recorded peaks may lead to impressions like Mark’s “Sounds like comparing the space shuttle takeoff to a bunch of 747s taking off” when they never even blasted the TH-215’s.
While I am pleased people like the sound quality, I am a little concerned that just how loud they can go was not clearly demonstrated. The difference is a little like the difference in output between a sealed and vented box of equal size, except the Tapped horn doesn’t add the phase shift / group delay of the vented box and doesn’t have the drooped bass response / sound of a small horn.
Personally, I will be interested to see what the measurements said where each box was driven at a known Voltage (following a protocol). From those, one can calculate the difference in drive power due to the different nominal impedances and determine efficiency differences.
More importantly I would echo David, Ivan and others that the most useful thing that can be gained by these kinds of events (direct side by side listening) is that some of the biggest names with the highest price tags have products, which in this situation are figuratively “emperors without cloths”.
This is possible because acoustic memory is very poor, people rarely get to hear anything side by side with anything else combined with big buck Boseification image building. In my personal opinion (not DSL’s ), there are some highly polished, highly respected acoustical turds floating in great numbers out there.
You can see / hear / identify them, or not, when doing side by sides.
Lastly, I would again echo David at his suggestion that this kind of thing be done in a larger space, Ideally this would be outside or a stadium etc where measurements would be or nearly are half space and at a distance which removes the source size / box size errors which appear near field.
Also, this lets people move farther away back to where ones ears are more linear and more able to hear some speaker issues (where as local noise is more audible up close).
Anyway, I’ll cut this off here and get back to work.
Best,
Tom