recently I’ve been using llms to analyze and compare speaker measurements like frequency response, impedance/phase, lateral/vertical response, spectral-decay plots, and step response.

there’s a longstanding debate in audiophile circles about the importance of measurements (“objective”) vs. listening in-person (“subjective”) when evaluating speakers and components.

the reality is far more complex because speakers are both an engineering problem and a psychoacoustic one, all wrapped up in the deeply personal realm of music.

pictured below are Rockport Avior II speakers with a Jadis integrated amp. you can also see a bunch of Pass gear in the silver cases.

I’ve been working on this for nearly a month now: feeding chat all sorts of speaker measurements and asking for it to search for and aggregate first-hand accounts from audiophile forums.

usually this boils down to figuring out how specific components sound relative to one another—or how they might sound when combined with one another—which is actually quite difficult to figure out without listening in-person.

tldr; is that chat helps fill in my engineering blind spots and I help guide it towards understanding subjectivity, taste, and aesthetics.