I think it also depends upon budget, and the objectives of the study. If you have the budget, the speaker will be mounted in the wall so that there is not sound coming out of the sides or back of the speaker. In a true free-field situation, out of doors or an anechoic chamber, these side, top, bottom and back vibrations should not reach the listener’s ears [with the possible exception of very long wavelengths]. Room coloration can be reduced by proximity to the speaker. Elevation and angle of the drivers will also vary from listener to listener.
Not all coaxial speakers are made equal. You would want the driver to be phase and time-aligned to avoid phase cancellations through the crossover frequency.
If you need high quality, which you seem to be looking for, I would imagine the minimum cost of this speaker would start around five-hundred pounds sterling. Acquiring ‘one’ high quality speaker may mean going to the manufacturer. High quality speakers are often sold as pairs, matched as precisely as possible.
The speaker, ideally, will come with a printout of its response curves.
I use Dynaudio BM5 mkIII at home, and the tweeters are about 45-50 cm from my ears, aimed directly at my eyes. They may have been discontinued. Try contacting Dynaudio with the specifics of your needs.
Kevin
Dear Colleagues, So far we have been conducting our behavioural experiments using high quality headphones, but for various reasons will need to shift to using free field sound presentation for some of our work. I was hoping you might be able to recommend a high quality loud speaker to use for this purpose; Ideally, one that we can purchase easily from the UK. Our requirements: Experiments are conducted in a small-ish sound-proof booth, and we plan to position a single loudspeaker about 50-70 cm in front of the listener (space constraints prevents this from being any further away). Stimuli are spectrally rich ‘soundscapes’. My understanding is that we should prefer single cone speakers? Many thanks, Maria Maria Chait PhD Reader in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience UCL Ear Institute 332 Gray's Inn Road London WC1X 8EE
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