Sir T.

I think you are right in the sense that AN puts the speaker in their best theoretical light - correct size room, perfectly rigid walls but to be fair to Peter he is in Europe and probably lives in a home where the walls are not made of plaster like they are here. So he may very well have the room and rigid walls to get those numbers. Martin Colloms may as well. And some may say he should advertise to where most of his consumers live - only 5% of AN's business is in North America. So it's a lot of European solid walls.

The interesting thing about all the measurements is how it seems people measure them so differently. It is kind of nice to see so many AN E reviews. Hi-Fi Choice measured them and they got both the -6db point and 94.5db on the non high efficiency version of the AN E. That actually bettered the AN spec for the model. So did the J in their bass test.

Stereophile has yet to do a corner measurement - well except for Art Dudley and for some reason people seem to assume he doesn't know how to measure - he does.

"for maximum bass reinforcement (footnote 3). I tried that, and while I was amazed by their extension—flat to 25Hz!

Footnote 3: For the newbie: This isn't a horn effect, but rather a simple means of countering the difficulty that a small loudspeaker has when it tries to disperse low-frequency sounds toward the listener. (As notes descend below the frequency whose half-wavelength equals the diameter of the radiating surface, dispersion becomes increasingly spherical and nondirect.) To place a loudspeaker near one or more room boundaries is to close off that many paths to the meandering low-frequency waveform, and thus increase the likelihood that bass energy will make its way to the listening area.—Art Dudley"