A Question About Time Alignment
I was reading a review of the Wilson Alex V on Stereophile recently. (Published just in time. I’m thinking about picking up a pair. Maybe a couple for the bedroom, too.) And it raised a long-standing question of mine, one that I hope the wiser minds on this site can answer.
Wilson’s big selling point is aligning the different frequencies so they all reach your ear simultaneously. As I understand it, that’s why they have minute adjustments among the various drivers. The woofers put out bass notes that move slowly thanks to their long sound waves while the tweeters are playing faster moving, high frequency notes with short waves. Wilson lets you make adjustments so that they all arrive at the ear at once.
It seems to me, however, that live music isn’t time aligned. Suppose I’m playing the piano and you’re sitting across the room. When I stretch out my left hand to hit the low notes, those notes travel along the same long, slow wavelengths as the notes from Wilson’s woofers. Similarly, the treble notes I play with my right hand move quickly through the short wavelengths. The notes from the piano are naturally out of alignment. If Wilson’s goal is to achieve a lifelike sound, aligning the frequencies doesn’t seem like the way to do it.
Wilson has been selling lots of zillion dollar speakers for lots of years and people continue to gobble ‘em up. Something must be wrong with my line of reasoning. Would someone please point out where I’ve gone wrong? Nicely?
I think that if you have the machines and knowledge, it would be possible. I wouldn't be able to get there, lacking in both.
I did see a local guy who built his own tonearm using wood. I think that he understood the concept, but the wood taught him a lesson by a slight warp. It was flat and thin, and not so well made in my opinion. I didn't even give it a second look as to what was the pivot. He was proud but should have been embarrassed. |
You need to start someplace. Bet these guys built a few duds.
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jerryg123,That tonearm is way above what I saw. Again, if the right machines are available, that could push me over the edge.
Would it be correct to say that some form of time alignment starts at the source? |
Even with my Dual Concentric Tannoy Berkeley’s where the pepperpot tweeter is located back into the mouth of the horn loaded 15 inch drivers the bass does sometimes seem to be slightly lagging behind the rest of the sound. However, this may be due to cabinet resonance issues rather that drive unit alignment time differences. Thankfully the Berkeley’s are said to crossover at 1kHz and thus everything above that should be aligned. When it comes to low bass (sub 40 Hz) very few systems can match a good subwoofer for either clarity or power. It can also be problematic to describe bass as either fast or slow but there’s no doubt that some systems can display superior attack and decay of bass notes than others. And then there are those that don’t bother at all. In fact I’d guess that the bass response of the majority of loudspeakers starts to rapidly fall off the frequency response cliff below 50Hz. In those instances, time alignment should hardly be an issue.
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@4krowme no. Microphones and electronics generally close to perfect. The speaker dominates time and phase alignment by orders of magnitude compared to everything else. |
