A Question About Time Alignment

P6001,

Before you go buy the two pair of Wilsons I suggest

you read up a bit. Plenty of reference material for audiophiles

available. 

Not too long ago I sat in large listening room that featured the Wilson ($700K)

speakers.+ the Perry subs.  I heard 4 different speakers. Now they must have been 

poorly setup. But this dealer claims to sell more Wilson than anyone.

Later I was invited to listen to the same speakers in a customers home-

Different city- Only these were powered by Spectral instead of Burmeister.

Whole different coherent sound. 

Without correct time alignment the sound will never be right. 

I once did an experiment and replaced one of my Skogrand cables (12 meteres long, btw) with a simple 14 gauge wire from Home Depot, but cut to the precise length, and when I played the first song ("Thunder Kiss '65" by White Zombie) the difference in the music's arrival at my ears was so disorienting, I got nauseated and lost my lunch of Beluga caviar. It was dreadful. (sarcasm for the humour impaired).

I'll go with what the actual physicist says about sound waves in post 2.

Related is the issue of keeping your speaker wires the same length. The lengths we use are very small relative to signal speed, but, I still follow the rule. Makes a big difference using expensive cable.

I am pretty sure that the speed of sound is relatively constant at a given temp.

The speed of light is also a constant, and the speed of electricity is usually a bit slower than the speed of light for most cables.

The main reason to keep the cables the same length is more for resistance and the other electrical parameters like inductance and capacitance.
It has nothing to do with the shorter cable getting the sound to the speaker faster, slower or at an equal speed as the longer cable.

You also have to take the room  size , and  room treatment or lack of 

for 1st reflections ,bounce reflections  and hard surfaces ,as well of bass nulls n the room ,setup and damping ever more so effecting the sum ,Everything counts !!

Time alignment has nothing to do with instruments placement in an orchestra, that will (or sould) show up in the recording of said orchestra.

Remember, we are reproducing the recording of the orchestra and that recording includes cues as to where the sound of each instrument originated at the time of the recording.

Also, the speed of sound doesn’t change with frequency --

As mentioned above, time alignment in speakers has to do with the sounds coming out of different drive units. Take a guitar for example and a two-way speaker. Assuming that some of the notes of that guitar are reproduced by the tweeter and some by the woofer, you realise that a delay in the sound emanating from the woofer will sound odd --

As mentioned above, Wilson (and others) tries to minimise delays by aligning the drive units vertically - for example, the back of a tweeter with the back of a woofer, meaning the woofer cone will seem to be well in front of the tweeter.

The rest of the delay compansation has to be done in the xover -- a very difficult task and AFAIK very few speaker manufacturers attempt it.