Does Time alignment and Phase coherency make for a better loudspeaker?

The last paragraph in the stereophile review of the meridian dsp 8000 JA asks why the speaker wasn’t time aligned since they could basically do it for free and the reply was that specific xover design sounded better without it. The new dsp 8k’s are time aligned with the ability to switch it off and on with the remote and tbh I don’t think I can hear any difference.

I guess if we discount the waveform, then not having speakers time aligned makes sense if we just trust our ears?

They do look like some expensive speakers.

And it makes it a bit difficult to try other cables being a fully built active speaker.

((((JA asks why the speaker wasn’t time aligned since they could basically do it for free and the reply was that specific xover design sounded better without it.)))

I think the true answer is its not free!

 Actually very laborious in order to do it correctly using pis-tonic drivers networked in an-echoic neutral chamber custom tuned to 1/10th of a DB only then behave as a true coherent phase and time aligned speaker. Then in field tilt back properly done to your chair and ear height with distance from speaker allows the magic to happen. In the real world  most all designers and simple folks will run from this task.

  JohnnyR Vandersteen dealer

You can turn it on and off the Dutch and Dutch 8c as well. They say for certain studio work it might be advantageous to turn it off but in a basic home environment you're probably not going to notice a difference, they recommend leaving it on. I've never noticed a difference.

Lots to unpack in this thread.

Would it not be best to start with how we perceive sound? Our hearing is sensitive to timing over a narrow frequency range, about 200-1500Hz. It would make sense to have time alignment over that frequency range. Many speakers with mid-woofers in the 5-7" range by virtue of where their crossover frequencies are already are time aligned in this frequency range (single driver).

In terms of sound stage, all the other information we use for position, is frequency and volume based, not timing based. With that being the case, is there a good argument for time alignment over the whole frequency range?

@mijostyn , you appear to be advocating that a flat in-room frequency response is the ideal scenario. That is not supported by most people's listening impressions or research into preference, all which suggest a sloping reduced output at higher frequencies.

There is a misconception that in-room frequency should be perfectly flat in order to perfectly recreate the original performance. It sounds great on the surface but it is a flawed premise as you are not trying to recreate the performance, you are trying to recreate what was heard by the recording/mixing engineer, and they have already adjusted the frequency response based on what they were hearing at their workstation which is usually two somewhat near field speakers, but the total response ends up closer to downward sloping at higher frequencies, especially true when they do final mix and test it on larger audio systems and/or headphones which appear to sound best when targeted at a downward slope past about 3KHz.

Some of this may even harken back to the attenuation you would experience seeing a live orchestra or concert hall at typical seating distances and distance to instruments (the front row is rarely where the best sound is).

Speakers that have sharp dispersion limits such as horns, planar speakers and linear arrays have large advantages acoustically in residential rooms. A properly deadened small room say 16 X 30 sounds better than a really big room with high ceilings because these rooms usually have acoustic signatures that are harder to get rid of, they echo.

There is more sense and more useful information in the paragraph above than in every thread and post on cable and fuses combined, and you could probably throw in 90% of the threads and posts on DACs and amplifiers too.

I am not saying that these types of speakers are without their own unique flaws as well, but far too much energy is spent painting the pig, not dealing with the little "gifts" the pig has left all over your listening space. Seems pointless to get hung up on things that "may" make a 0.01db, or a few microseconds of difference, and ignore the things that make 1, 2, even 10db of difference, and even 10's of milliseconds of difference.