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Fig.7: Deviation 3.7–6.01: Acoustic Energy AE2 (black); Amrita AMRIT-Minimonitor (red); JMLab Micron (sample 1) (green); Acoustat Spectra 11 (yellow); SOTA Panorama (sample 1) (blue); Dahlquist DQ12 (sample 1) (pink); Focal Aria (sample 1) (cyan); RSL Speedscreen II (gray); DANA Audio Model 1 (dark red); Apogee Stage (dark green); Monitor Audio Monitor 7 (dark yellow); Celestion 3000 (dark blue); Polk RTA 11t (dark pink); Cambridge Ambiance (dark cyan); Vieta Pro-5 (sample 1) (dark gray).

Fig.7: This final group is to a large extent the rogues' gallery when it come to frequency response. It is a rare speaker as unflat as the majority of these that gains anything but a very qualified recommendation from Stereophile's reviewers unless it is extremely inexpensive. The major exception is the Apogee Stage, which ends up here due to its sloping response across the band resulting in a high standard deviation. As DO's review pointed out, however, the smoothness of its response trend leads to a very natural, seamless midrange quality which can easily become addictive. Note also the Celestion 3000, which has a seamlessly flat midband typical of speakers in the higher groups. It ends up in this group, however, because of its early HF rolloff, which is accentuated by a peaky mid-treble. But in general, if you design a loudspeaker with these kinds of frequency-response aberrations, the worst thing you can do is submit it to Stereophile for review. (To be fair to Polk and Cambridge SoundWorks, we went out and bought our review samples.)