Experienced Numbers

Absolutely, of course not...

But just listening to the driver doesn't accomplish that either.

That's the arguement, in response to the oft-communicated:

In fact, if you compared someone who just had the specs, to someone who just heard the woofer - even if they had experience with several alignments - the person with the specs not only has much, much more information to make decisions from than the person who has listened to it numerous times.
In fact, the person with the listening experience's information is going to be inherently skewed, by whatever the actual installation, signal chain, listening environment, and musical material was actually being experienced.
The person who has "heard" the subwoofer can't hope to have a complete picture of all that can possibly be "heard" of the subwoofer.

No, neither person has all the information that they could possibly have, but the person with the specs has more information than the person that's just got lots of listening time.

And the arguement that "someone might not understand the specs" really doesn't have it's place in this discussion, because on the other side of the fence, someone listening just as likely "might not know what to listen for", or might misinterpret something that they think they have heard.

The criticism of using measured parameters to make planning decisions just as a whole seems ludicrous...
It's absolutely your best, most complete source of information.
And sure, some listening may enhance that... but 99.9% of the time, it will simply confirm what the measured parameters reveal.

 

I think its time to end this. Its not really going anywhere. I think its safe to just agree to the following though:

Specs are useful to get an understanding of what a driver is likely to do in a particular enclosure outside of a vehicle. Once inside a vehicle things change because of the environment. The specs can not show this. Therefor you cannot know exactly what will happen in vehicle without prior knowledge of the vehicle and you cannot say for certain what the driver will actually do in a particular install without knowledge and experiene with whats going on in the install. Should you throw the specs out the window? No. Should you rely entirely on specs when deciding on a driver for something? No. Knowing the install and the specs are both valuable and should be used together.