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.
phusis, i'm sorry to say but you are wrong!
you need to go back & read a couple of really great threads (if you haven't already) &/or re-read them -
* Is DEQX a game changer?
* Sloped baffle
there is a lot of great info in these threads that will dispel a lot misconceptions you have...
A correction re. what you wrote - i'm talking about TIME-coherency (& not phase-coherency). These are 2 different things with time-coherency being the superset. A time-coherent speaker is always phase-coherent but a phase-coherent speaker is not time-coherent.
Time-coherency in a speaker is a design paradigm; it's a parameter that you trade-off in the midst of speaker design as you are thinking. Once you make up your mind to manuf a time-coherent speaker it dictates how you build that speaker. It's a decision you make at the very start.
You are talking about "mechanical alignment" - that's but one very small aspect of time-coherency in a speaker. Merely having a sloped baffle means very little (it just means that the acoustical centers of the drivers are on a vertical plane) if the rest of the speaker design doesn't take it all the way towards making that speaker time-coherent.