Sloped baffle

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.

Simply putting the voice coils in the same plane does guarantee a cohesive and coherent sound.

Drivers that are placed close together are just as important for a cohesive sound.

It is equally important to have a bass driver that is as fast as the midrange otherwise you end up with a bass that seems disconnected. I hear this in some very expensive speakers.

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.

Just a supplemental fyi, here JA's bench test measurements for the Revel Salon 2:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/revel-ultima-salon2-loudspeaker-measurements

And one more, the might Magico Q7:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/magico-q5-loudspeaker-measurements

If nothing else, perhaps someone can explain how to properly interpret what these measurements mean. They do not look like the Vandy 7.