Loudspeaker voicing is a guessing game born of poor engineer-consumer communication

Evidence

Recording engineers listen to their loudspeakers and try to anticipate how well their art will “translate” in the consumer world, and loudspeaker manufacturers try to anticipate how well their products will deliver the recorded arts. These people don’t talk to each other enough. Consequently, the final stage in loudspeaker development sometimes involves a “voicing” session in which the tonal balance is manipulated to achieve what is hoped to be a satisfactory compromise for a selection of recordings expected to be played by the target customer. There are the “everybody loves bass” voices, the time-tested boom and tizz “happy-face” voices, the polite “slightly depressed upper-midrange voices” (compensating for overly bright close-miked recordings, and strident string tone in some classical recordings), the daringly honest “tell it as it is” neutral voices, and so on. It is a guessing game. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1054

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘voicing’ means in the loudspeaker context, distinguishing it from musical voicing introduced in the prior paragraph.