Man you whiffed right through that without even attempting to answer the question. The answer is no, they are not the same phrase and don't reference the same skill level. They speak on two different things and should not be used interchangeably.
I have never seen the movie Elf with Will Ferrel. I find Bucks post interesting for the most part though some of the animated pictures mess with my eyes.
What is wrong with Bucks Box Designs? I think some of his designs are "outside of the box" so to speak. Do you think you are at or above his skill level in enclosure design? Can you design an subwoofer enclosure as well as he can? Can you design a better enclosure than he can?
I know you and i battle it out a lot here, but this is an honest answer to your post.
The person who is "the best" is also "one of the best" by nature. Being "one of the best" does not necessarily mean "the best". Nuances of the spoken word.
We know nothing of Mr PhD and what his method of evaluation is. That greatly devalues the phrase that he may have said to Buck. It could have been hollow praise. It could have been a brush-off. It could be that Buck is the only car sub box designer he has interacted with. When I am told on a public forum that the information I share is bullshit simply because it can be found and shared with a Google search instead of scanning pages from law books or encyclopedias or court transcripts, then I am CERTAINLY not going to take Buck's hearsay as evidence that he is "one of the best" sub box designers in the world.
His designs are based on known acoustic theory and can be replicated by anyone with simple design software, or through manual calculations if they know the formulas to use. I can do both. I was "designing" and building subs and home speaker enclosures before a computer was available to the average home, and WELL before software for design existed to the average consumer. My first box I made was a simple 4th order bandpass with two CV 8" woofers. It hit 130dB with a Rockford Punch amp, measured on a calibrated meter. Not a big deal now, but that was pretty solid back then.
I was the first installer in my region to do a true isobaric setup using 4 12" subs in a one-piece dual enclosure (basically, two fully independent enclosures encased to make one large one).
His uses right angles in his ports, which is known to degrade performance (it's the physics of airflow, which are immutable).
He does not base his designs on the actual operating parameters of the woofer in question. It's a fact that every speaker made will vary from the average parameters that are measured on the production prototype. Unless the mfgr. is providing piece-specific parameters for the woofer in question, he is creating a suboptimal design.
After the box is built, he is not doing measurements on it to ensure the design worked.
All of these complaints may be splitting hairs when we're talking about a box that simply needs to hit a certain dB at a certain frequency with unlimited power to drive it, but splitting hairs is what we're talking about when we use the word "best" or the phrase "one of the best".
And example of splitting hairs is a watchmaker doing a guilloche on the INTERIOR of a caseback. No one will ever see it except for the watchmaker and a servicing watchmaker, but it's the finest of details that make someone "one of the best". Splitting hairs.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
www.zdnet.com
www.dailystar.co.uk
