Questions Re: Time & Phase Alignment

With Vandersteen, Thiel and Green Mountain you are exploring some of the speaker manufacturers who have been most successful in coping with the inherent difficulties and problems of crossover design. There is a growing movement toward single driver systems that entirely eschew the whole crossover controversy by excluding them entirely from speaker design. Your posts suggest that you may well be interested in exploring such an option. Naturally there are tradeoffs involved but the Zu products have minimized the sacrifice necessary for such an exchange. Since buying Zu Druids about a year ago, I have become active with the company and have a loose relationship with them that has business potential. I am not a dealer, per se, but I am in a position tp profit if a demonstration in my home ever leads to a factory direct sale. Otherwise I am no different than any other audiophile with preferences. This info is offered to indicate the potential for bias in my comments due to factory affiliation.
I would recommend that you call Sean Casey at Zu and ask these questions of him. He has always been very helpful.

I have Zu Druids in my 2nd system. They are very nice speakers. However, they are not in the SOTA league of such $10K+ speakers as the new Thiels and higher-end Green Mountain C3s.

I already have great speakers in my Hyperion and Zus. I'm kinda looking for, now, what might be the be-all-end-all, truly SOTA speaker. At this point, to me, that means full freq-response, multidriver, dynamic, and time and phase-aligned.

So, yes, I'm familiar with Thiel & GM, but have never heard Vandersteens.

I sort of have two thread going now with very similar topics... sorry about that.

(Speakers which are) full freq-response, multidriver, dynamic, and time and phase-aligned

That's a tall order, my friend.
I strongly recommend you forget it: multidriver, & phase + time aligned don't go together. You will laways have phase matters with many drivers.

Well performing full-range passive spkrs are extremely expensive. Often they are not practical; heavy, difficult to drive, to place, subzero waf, etc.

If I may be so bold, ENjoy what you have. Cheers!

Paul, I own the new GMA Calypso's and they are very, very impressive speakers. I agree with others that say search the archives here for comments by "RoyJ" (Johnson of GMA) and also by "Karls" (Karl S. of Audiomachina), both very well versed on time/phase coherence. To my ears (30 year musician) a time/phase coherent speaker like a GMA brings you closer to the music than a non time/phase design. Once you own a pair of time/phase coherent speakers, you will find it pretty much impossible to go back. My opinion only.....for what it's worth to you. E-mail me if you have any questions I can answer for you about the Calypso's.

Paul, you are certainly on the right track in terms of the design principles that should ultimately lead to true fidelity in a loudspeaker. Unfortunately, there are always tradeoffs in every speaker design, and every implementation of a given principle has variables that lead to differentiating sonic results. In other words, there are no perfect speakers.

I am a huge fan of time alignment and phase coherency, evidenced by the fact that for the past 27 years I've owned a pair of Beveridge Model 2 SW loudspeakers. These are full range electrostatics with no crossover ( I eliminated the high pass X-over) save for the low pass on the subwoofer. This speaker probably comes as close to a perfectly time aligned and phase correct speaker as any design ever made, but it still errs in ways important to music reproduction.

The bottom line is, whether a speaker's design is critically time aligned and phase correct or not, ultimately it gets down to how you perceive its ability to reproduce music. I have long admired Theil's work, but at Theil's RMAF demonstration this year I was most disappointed in the sound of the new 3.7s. To me, they had a coloration to their sound that was akin to holding a long piece of tin foil between two fingerand shaking it. Everyone who heard it at the same time that I did reported hearing the same coloration. However, someone from our group who heard it later didn't experience it that way, so maybe there was something else contributing to that phenomena that was later remedied.

The GMAs are very fine speakers, and the C3s, when set up properly, rival my old Beveridges (I spent quite some time auditioning them with Roy last summer at his facility in Colorado Springs). Roy is an extremely competent designer, as is Jim Theil, but between the two, Roy's would certainly get my vote. Of course, YMMV.