Crutchfield Speaker Compare

I may be late to the party, but has everyone seen Crutchfield’s speaker compare tool?

https://www.crutchfield.com/speakercompare/

If you use supported headphones, you can compare the sound of many speakers for sale on their site. It’s been fun going through a bunch of speakers, a few discoveries:

Biggest surprise: I’m really impressed how good the Elac Debut 2.0 series is for the price. They put many more expensive speakers to shame.
Biggest eye-opener: The improvements beyond the SVS Ultra’s price point seem to be very subtle where the price increases exponentially (law of diminishing returns).
Biggest disappointment: Elac Uni-FI, my previous impression were that these are an improved version of the Debut 2.0, but they seem very dull and veiled.

Curious what everyone thinks of this tool. It seems like a big step forward for online speaker shopping.
Maybe we can get @ZeosPantera to do a Z review on it??

It’s neat in idea but in practice imo it’s not really going to give you a good representation of what something sounds like at all. There are so many factors of what affects the sound of a sound demo that you might as well be going in blind imo

I agree that the room is very influential, but they seemed to put some science into this based on reading their site, and it should at least show the difference between the voicing of the speakers, no?

Imo still not really, there will be differences that you did hear, but they won’t represent the sound of the speaker in the first place. Even if they did try to record them properly, it’s still passing through their mics, their preamps, their adc, any editing they did, compensation and adjustment to try and remove the aspect of the headphones, your dac, your amp, and your headphones, all coloring the sound. Headphones can’t really recreate the sound of a speaker either, so there’s that. Also another big issue is their use of an anechoic chamber. It’s good for measuring speakers in an anechoic chamber, but when you actually listen to them in one they actually don’t sound that great. Part of what makes speakers sound good is the room they are in, and speakers are designed to be used in a room, you shove them in a anechoic chamber and you get a very different sound than you would in most rooms, defeating the point of trying to listen to what you might get for yourself

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it may a help a smidge but tend to agree with m0n here… that said the debut 2.0 are pretty great for the price :+1:… if you’re like me and can’t listen before you buy id suggest getting advice on forums and checking out reviews… I highly suggest zero fidelity on YouTube… he hasn’t steered me wrong yet and replies to comments on his videos… also m0n himself has an uncanny amount of experience with gear

I like this YT channel:

It’s not perfect but it does a pretty good job of contrasting the sound signatures of two speakers across many genres of music. His mics weren’t the best but he just got new ones so hopefully that helps going forward.

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