At normal listening levels -- below pain/OSHA hearing damage threshold -- this speaker is fantastic.On-axis performance measured from six feet away in a room with a hard floor followed a Harman target small room curve. Individual near field measurements of the tweeter and woofer were flat along the Harman down sloping curve. I didn't check off-axis because off-axis performance will follow the design engineering conducted by JBL. In this case, the primary purpose of testing the on-axis performance is to see if I received a product with a manufacturing defect. For example, one of the components in the speaker could have been damaged during manufacturing or transport.Like all stereo channel speakers, you'd need to add a separate low frequency system if you want complete hi-fi sound but that's a limitation imposed by listening to music inside a room not the speaker. If you don't want to mess with that complexity this speaker will play down to 50Hz to give the impression of full sound for casual listening.I'm tempted to say this speaker is as good as it gets for residential living space sized rooms. I won't go as far as that because speakers can be designed to produce different sound fields for different applications. But for a regular speaker this speaker is really (really) good. Or maybe I can say it this way: if you listen to this speaker and don't like it you can be sure the problem is not the speaker. Maybe the speaker is sitting in the wrong part of the room (e.g. jammed into a corner or up against a wall), maybe your signal source is bad, maybe you want an entirely different type of speaker, or maybe one of the speaker components has a manufacturing defect or got damaged during transport. Which brings up a point, you could use this speaker as a reference to trouble shoot your system. That's a big deal because speakers are normally the weakest link in a home system.If you had an expensive stereo system set up by someone else and you wanted to find out if it was actually good you could buy these speakers to compare. There are a lot of very expensive stereo speakers out there that aren't as good as these speakers. Which brings up another point, if you practice listening to these speakers you will be better equipped to identify snake oil. You can use these speakers to teach yourself how to not get sent down rabbit holes by well-meaning audiophiles who don't know what they're talking about. There are some well-meaning audiophiles out there who are unwittingly influenced by aspects of the speaker that have nothing to do with the sound of the speaker. They sell you snake oil without knowing they're selling you snake oil, they're innocent dupes. In the context of audio performance, you would need to have a really good reason to buy speakers more expensive than these and you would need to be sure you knew exactly -- through personal listening experience -- why you were spending that extra money. On the other hand, if you want a pretty speaker that looks beautiful in your room then absolutely spend the extra money. Just make sure the pretty speaker sounds as good as these JBLs. These JBLs can be your reference.