Do ported speakers sound bad? Kali Audio LP8 tested.

I recently asked you in a poll, what do you want to see? And the Cali Audio speakers won by a hair. Now, I'm glad we're not doing the Yamaha ones cuz they sort of sound a bit crap. And the Cali Audio is really the best in its class, the best bang for buck. There's a DSP crossover baked into it with EQ evening out all of the irregularities in the frequency response and making it ruler flat by correcting everything. But like I've said time and time again, just because you correct the frequency domain, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a squeaky clean time domain because the two aspects, the frequency and time domains are two different sides of the same coin. So great, there's a completely flat frequency response. So when we flick between the digital and the Cali audio speakers, we shouldn't hear anything jumping out at us as being wrong or imbalanced in terms of frequencies. But that doesn't tell us anything about the time domain performance. And so that's what I'm more interested in when we have a speaker with an obviously flat frequency response. The Cali Audio speaker has resonant ports to hype up the bass frequencies. So let's take a listen to the time domain performance of the bass. And my absolute favorite piece of music for checking that is a radio head track called Fereral. And I've been using this for years to check exactly this because it has a very specific really cool groove to the kick. is kind of like this weird kick thing which is electronic and sort of it's kind of a hybrid between a kick drum and subbase and it's got a very specific pattern and we can listen to that pattern and put headphones on and listen to it now on the digital so we understand what that pattern is and then I'll give you a clue what to listen for after we listen to this. So put headphones on and listen now to the kick pattern. [Music] So you should have been able to identify two core components to that low frequency groove. There's a very short and precise kick B and then there is a longer sub uh frequency thing going on. So when we put it together, there's boomb like this. And it's very important and makes this groove really interesting and nice. I really love that groove. But when it's played in an inaccurate system with weird loose time domain properties, it sounds completely different. And the reason why I'm explaining this in advance is because it takes a bit more ear training and skill to identify and assess time domain properties because anyone can understand frequency based discrepancies. Because let's say the frequency response is all uneven and the high frequencies are way too loud and you listen to it and it's like, "Oh, the the high hat is sticking out.