Stereo loudspeakers are usually operated in a reverberant environment and meant to create a phantom aural scene, a believable illusion in the listener’s mind. But what exactly must the loudspeakers and the room do to optimally support such illusion and not distract from it? Loudspeakers always held a fascination for me and I designed, built and listened to many prototypes in a seemingly never-ending search for the ideal loudspeaker for my home stereo system. For thirty-seven years of my professional life I was involved with research and development of electronic test and measurement equipment covering the frequency range from 10 kHz to 22 GHz. In terms of wavelengths this is equivalent to acoustics from 0.01 Hz to 25 kHz. Loudspeakers have many analogies to electromagnetic antennas. I will talk about the progression in my understanding and design of loudspeakers. In the end it was primarily about the radiation pattern, though I did not recognize its overriding importance initially. The ideal stereo loudspeaker has a frequency independent polar response.
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