THE IMPORTANCE OF TIME DOMAIN RESPONSE MUST READ


Speaker designers ignore or downplay the importance of TIME. Why?

A high end speaker should be as accurate as possible and that means it should not only be optimized with regard to frequency response but time response.

Back in the 70’s and around that time, speaker engineers thought that a perfect speaker would be one that had a flat response. This idea has waxed and waned in popularity over the years and even now there is no consensus.

What the speaker engineers forgot to consider is Time response.

The time reponse of a speaker is how fast it starts and stops. A perfect speaker would have a perfect time response of 0. Since this is not possible, we must get as close to it as possible. The problem is speakers engineers have neglected this aspect of the design and so speakers over the last 40 years have not improved in this respect.

Time is such an important aspect of the sound we hear. We not only hear tone but also time. The brain can detect time differences of only a few microseconds. Experiments have shown that the start of each note is what we use to determine what instrument is producing that sound.

We must ensure that our crossovers do not smear the time response because it will be heard by our ears. Time inaccuracy is why high end speakers do not sound like real instruments.

Diffraction from the cabinet can also cause time smear. We need spherical cabinets not square boxes. Tweeters need to be time aligned in order to ensure that when the woofer stops so does the tweeter. When the woofer starts, so must the tweeter. The woofer itself has to have a Qts of ZERO to prevent time smear. Ports must not be used or else you will get ringing.

We need to make it mandatory for speaker companies to publish the time response of all their speakers so that consumers can easily compare and decide exactly what they want. Some may actually prefer a speaker that has a poorer time response and that is fine. The problem is, we cant decide unless we know what we are buying can we?

Unfortunately, 90% of speakers on the market, even high end speakers have ports. And they are also made of cheap wood, even though there must be better materials by now. Some materials ring more than others.

So dont be deceived folks. If you want better speakers, you will probably have to make them yourself because speaker manufacturers dont care about sound quality. They spend millions of dollars on anechoic chambers all so that they can get a flat response but they spend zero effort on better time domain response. We are being duped.

kenjit

Tough crowd. No manners. And one of the reasons I don't bother reading this forum much anymore.

Its not just about getting them to know how wrong they are. Its about getting them to design speakers correctly. Audiophiles spend millions of dollars on high end speakers. It is a multi million dollar industry. We deserve better quality.

Kenjit, your entire history here from as far as I can remember has been throwing aspersions on speaker manufacturers, designers and DIYers with vague and unprovable statements and absolutely no specific example of how to do things better, or even what you’ve heard which sounds better or worse. Remember the month you spent arguing that there was no need to markup parts? Or the thread where you said you took apart a speaker and saw it had a bunch of parts in it you did not understand? Hilarious.

I dare you to hold up a single specific example anyone else could replicate or go listen to as better or worse than what you are suggesting. Somehow you never do, you just show up talking trash, in this case such general trash you are denigrating speaker makers as a class in their entirety.

Thanks @erik_squires . Well said. And if he cares about music and speakers so much. why will he not say what he listens to?