Flat response - does it really matter?

Coming soon - I'm going to talk about the importance of a flat response.

This chart shows my current speakers measured in two ways. The dark line shows a gated measurement at 1m - this is the kind of chart normally shown for a speaker. The light blue line shows a farfield measurement taken in the listening position. The differences are that the 1m measurement includes only the sound from the speaker, while the listening position also captures the influence of the room.

The farfield has a 25 db range, while the gated measurement only 15 db. Considering that the response overall is sloping down, the speaker is actually fairly flat.