I brought the Sorta Studio 2 "patio speakers", a 15 watt receiver and CD player.

Sitting on the asphalt, away from the building, there was little bass output below about 60 Hz. Zero Low "E" on the bass.

Amazing how powerful boundary reflections and reinforcement are. An entire octave gone!

So what does an anechoic environment do to evaluate bass? Can't, right? And if there is lttle bass, how does the anechoic room offer a correct way to evaluate mids and highs so unbalanced?

Outdoors, things are much clearer sounding, but bass gets lost sometimes. It takes a much more powerful speaker to drive bass outdoors than it does indoors.

Anechoic chambers are attempts to make an echo-free environment. It's not too hard to do at high frequencies, but gets much more difficult down low. Most anechoic chambers are only truly anechoic down to the midrange. That's why it's better to test subwoofers outdoors - It's a truly anechoic environment.

I was also burned for not considering room-effect on bass when I built my 5 cu ft cabinets for a pair of JBL 2235. One the computer model, the port tuning was supposed to be flat down to 30Hz. But in-room, the bass was overpowering. Through trial and error, I found that a sealed cabinet worked best. I'm beginning to understand the Japanese's taste for early shallow rolloff vs late and sharp.

gar.

Testing in a chamber or outdoors is no good for building speakers. The speaker needs to be tested and build for room it's intended to be used. a common type of room at the very least. Ideally, custom made for the specific room.

My design philosophy is to design the speaker to sound right on axis and generate a uniform reverberent field. That makes them sound good just about everywhere. Using this approach, the main thing left is boundary influence, and making speakers designed for corners pretty much sets that. Other models are generally designed to be placed near the wall or corner, for similar reasons.

I dont fully understand what you mean. can you give some understanding and examples?

A loudspeaker's directivity determines the reverberent field. Uniform directivity along with uniform response makes a uniformly charged reverberent field. If directivity fluxuates up and down, then the reverberent field won't be uniform even if on-axis response is good.

Uniform directivity is one reason why the seven π loudspeakers sound so good. Every sound that comes from them radiates in a 90° pattern. Every horn uses a 90° flare. So from the deepest bass (set by the room wall angle) to the midrange (set by its horn flare) to the treble (set by the tweeter's horn flare) - Every sound source radiates a uniform 90°.

The bass-reflex boxes use another technique that is good. They are designed for DI matching between bass and treble. This isn't contant directivity, but it is uniform. The midwoofer exhibits collapsing directivity up to the crossover point, where it is equal to the directivity of the horn. That way the transition is smooth, so the reverberent field is smooth. Uniformly collapsing directivity isn't as good as uniformly constant directivity, but it is better than directivity that narrows up to the crossover point and then abrubtly widens back up again, as is common on most direct radiating (non horn loaded) speakers.

I forget for the percentage is, but the large majority of what we hear in-room is reflected sound and a lot of that comes from first reflection of the speaker's off-axis response.