Dunlavy Minimum Phase Mods

Here’s the (an) issue with that. They may do those nice square waves at one point in space, or maybe on a line from the speaker to the listening seat. But what about what comes out of it off-axis? All it takes is to face a speaker away from you to know that the sound level really doesn’t drop down all that much. IOW, you hear the wavefronts that leaves the speaker off-axis -- not just the one going out perpendicular to the baffle. Linear or minimum phase only makes sense with a coaxial or point source speaker, otherwise it’s just a techno-game (IMO).

For people who don’t know, Bill invented OmniMic and XSim. He knows his stuff, so questions below are for my own education. I ask all of this not really knowing if ideal phase is all that beneficial. From what I have heard, I could not tell a difference.

I’m not sure if you are arguing room acoustics or off-angle driver phase matching.

Room/Power Response
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You are, of course, right in the sense of the overall power response, but isn’t the goal of good speaker placement and room acoustics to have a nice delay between the initial signal and the first reflections?

Off-Angle
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Take something like the Dunlavy. Assuming your ears stayed at tweeter level wouldn’t being off-axis be fairly benign? And isn’t it better to start from "ideal" than a normal 3-way alignment?

Of course, I can see a true coaxial being ideal here, like Thiel or Kef, where the alignment stays consistent over a broad range.



Best,

E

Linear Phase is preferable except when high Q filters (aggressive filter) are used.

High Q filters can result in audible pre-ringing and a minimum phase filter will have no pre-ringing - so a snare hit will sound more natural with a minimum phase high Q filter.

However, I think high Q filters should be avoided period! 

So if you are dealing with low Q filters then linear phase is always the best. The reason linear phase is best is because it preserves the relative phase information in the audio. The timbre of a musical sound that covers many octaves or percussive instruments that have a wide spectrum response will be preserved faithfully by a linear phase filter. Minimum phase changes the relationship between various frequencies and can really mess up correct timbre.

In a speaker crossover with a low Q filter (gentle filter) I would recommend always linear phase (so as to preserve timbre especially in higher frequencies)

Perhaps I'm missing something? Is this just supposed to be an academic exercise? It would appear to me that at great extra complexity and cost one has made what might be marginal improvements over the simpler, less expensive alternative?

@unsound

That's kind of what I am asking. From a technical perspective, recreating a square wave, or near perfect impulse response with purely passive, multi-way speaker is really difficult.

Worthwhile?