Someone with your wealth of knowledge should immediately see the flaw in the Stradivarius testing. You even refer to it in one of your previous posts.
Clue.......what's statistically known as a confounding variable.
Ever been to a hi-fi show? What was your overall impression of how the exhibited systems sounded?
Regarding electronic measurements in general.....we've been at it for less than 100 years and look how far we've come. Are you expecting no further progress in the next 100 years? Should we fire all our R&D guys and gals 'cos there's nothing left to discover? Given that we still don't even know exactly what's going on with static electricity, the list of what we know we don't know is still pretty damned long. Let me give you a specific example of what I mean. When you listen to music you listen to the guitar, the drum, the cymbals, the violin, the voice etc. Name me any piece of electronic hardware that can pick out and measure any of those instruments like the ear/brain does. So when the voice sounds harsh, how would you pick that aspect out of a frequency spectrum and measure it? One day it will be possible, but not today.
Car vs. home stereo/multi channel
Your points about imaging are perfectly valid except you're forgetting one important thing.....when designing systems for use in the home, the designer has no control over room size, shape, construction, acoustics, partnering equipment etc. so designs and tunes for the average. On installation, unless you use a processor to measure and correct for room response, you are stuck with trying to install a fixed system in a fixed acoustic space. If you take a lively, slightly bright sounding system and install it in a room with lots of reflections and little absorption i.e a room with a long RT-60 reverb time, you'll end up with a very fatiguing sound. Similarly if you install in an L shaped room, where one speaker has a wall and the other doesn't, you'll never get proper imaging, unless you take other acoustic measures.
A car is ENTIRELY different. The complete system and acoustic environment is fixed, so everything to do with the system and its installation is under the control of the designer. He can adjust for reverb time, he can change the frequency balance....resonances can be damped or tuned out, speaker phase shifts compensated, response curves corrected, phase adjusted, cross over points and filters manipulated, individual speaker levels set, etc. In short, the designer has almost complete control over the engineering of the sound waves that reach your ear. And since imaging is your brain's interpretation of the sound waves entering your ears, its entirely feasible to produce imaging in an automotive environment. One very simple example of what I'm talking about is having volume increase with speed to create the impression of constant volume level and clarity, despite increasing background noise.
If we go back to your point about bathrooms, why do you think a typical hi-fi sounds bad in a bathroom? Its because you're installing a system that's designed to work in a far larger, less reverberative space. But could you actually design and tune a system to sound good in a bathroom? There's absolutely no reason why not.....but it would sound pretty damned weird if you then installed it in a normal living room.
Of course please feel free to disagree (I'm sure you will and that's
) but I would politely request that you keep your replies nice and friendly, otherwise we descend to the level of the average acrimonious hi-fi forum, which I'm sure neither of us particularly enjoy.
Finally, here's how a Strad is supposed to sound. Bit different from the sound clips in the trial you mentioned and another clue why no one could hear the difference between the various violins.
Cheers!
Steve