Mr. Joseph wrote: "I've found that other things such as the dispersion characteristics, smoothness of power response, and clean decay corellate more powerfully with imaging and driver integration."
As an amateur speakerbuilder for about 20 years (who tried it all, even my own version of an ultra-high-slope crossover), and now as a dealer, I have to agree with Mr. Joseph's emphasis on radiation pattern and decay characteristics. I personally would trade off phase coherency in exchange for good radiation and decay characteristics.
I once built a speaker with true a first-order acoustic crossover (which is a helluva lot harder than it sounds). Yes it imaged quite well from the sweet spot, but the timbre wasn't very good. Recombining the same drivers (a Jordan module and an Audax woofer) with a higher-slope crossover at a much lower frequency sounded much better overall.
Ya'll remember the legendary Dahlquist DQ-10? Well, Jon Dahlquist found that he could either align the leading edge of the waveform, or the trailing edge, but not both. After listening tests, he chose to align the trailing edge, as he found that getting the decay right was more beneficial than getting the initial attack right.
Just for the record, I don't sell Jeff Joseph's speakers; he's a competitor. And a damn fine one at that.
As an amateur speakerbuilder for about 20 years (who tried it all, even my own version of an ultra-high-slope crossover), and now as a dealer, I have to agree with Mr. Joseph's emphasis on radiation pattern and decay characteristics. I personally would trade off phase coherency in exchange for good radiation and decay characteristics.
I once built a speaker with true a first-order acoustic crossover (which is a helluva lot harder than it sounds). Yes it imaged quite well from the sweet spot, but the timbre wasn't very good. Recombining the same drivers (a Jordan module and an Audax woofer) with a higher-slope crossover at a much lower frequency sounded much better overall.
Ya'll remember the legendary Dahlquist DQ-10? Well, Jon Dahlquist found that he could either align the leading edge of the waveform, or the trailing edge, but not both. After listening tests, he chose to align the trailing edge, as he found that getting the decay right was more beneficial than getting the initial attack right.
Just for the record, I don't sell Jeff Joseph's speakers; he's a competitor. And a damn fine one at that.