[...] the time-coherent speaker sacrifices the least & is very close to doing it all. Every genre of music plays superbly on it & the better one’s electronics get, the better the speakers sound. Music enjoyment for the long-haul....
bombaywalla --
There are too many other factors for a phase-coherent speaker to potentially sound like the less desirable choice compared to a speaker not being phase-coherent. I’m guessing you refer to speakers being mechanically aligned to achieve named virtue, although delay via DSP is a viable solution as well - likely better than any electrical ditto. In any case, phase-coherency alone - to my ears, at least - is far from the deciding factor.
The thought experiment could be made whether a hypothetical speaker of my liking, one not being phase coherent, would gain significantly being converted into phase-coherency. For the sake of not altering the overall design of the speaker let's just say we'd modify it accordingly via a DSP solution, bearing in mind other sonic changes that could follow in the wake of this implementation. In that case, given these are speakers I'd fancy despite of phase imperfections, I gather the phase modification (into coherency) could lead to the desirable outcome. If anything, and if proved to be a big factor, the rationale could be to seek out the overall preferred speaker principle as a phase coherent design, but as such phase coherency would only be one of many factors to achieve the desired sonic goal.