Sloped baffle

Bifwynne, if you don't mind a little more reading, I suggest Time and Phase Coherence by Roy Johnson from his website. This is very informative with illustrations, and you don't have to sort through confusing comments as in the threads from the links that were provided previously.

Hope this helps.

There is a really good book that explains a lot of this and is written for the person without a PHD. It's entitled "The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook".

I pulled my copy out and reread some of what was discussed above. I highly recommend it if anyone is interested in loudspeakers and how/why they work.

Sounds_real_audio -- your comment re placement if the drivers is interesting. There are some brands that stuff drivers every-which-way into the front baffle. One brand that comes to mind is Nola. I wonder how the Nolas manage the time and phase coherence attribute.

Al and others, take a look at John Atkinson's step measurements of the Revel Studio 2:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/revel-ultima-studio2-loudspeaker-measurements

JA notes that "the speaker is time-coherent rather than time-coincident: each drive-unit's step smoothly hands over to the next lower in frequency. This correlates with the superb frequency-domain integration between their outputs ...."

Two observations on my part.

First, the Vandy 7's step response plot shoots up like a rocket and then quickly rolls off and stays down. By contrast, the Studio 2 shoots up, rolls off and then rolls back up again. What does this mean? Why the differences?

The other observation is that the Studio 2 has a ruler flat frequency response. I believe the Studio 2 uses high order cross-overs, like my Paradigm S8s.

Interpretive comments are welcome.