By design, isn't a non time and phase coreect speaker's treble disjointed? As well as the bass and midrange.?
One would think (listen to Davey, he is very wise
). However, while having proper time alignment and phase is a plus, it's really the driver/cabinet/crossover design and a 1st order design can have even more problems with integration at times. You see, if a midrange driver has sufficiently wide dispersion, is sufficiently accurate and sufficiently low distortion at the upper end of its range, there is no audible crossover sound, even if its not phase correct or time aligned. You might be able to pick up some slight acoustic distortion or roughness, but it would be over such a wide area that it couldn't possibly be picked up subjectively as being disjointed and this type of disortion is surprisingly well surpressed by our ear/brain, far less apparent audibly than it is on a graph. Vandersteen 3A tweeters sound disjointed to me. How would you explain this? Although you could make a technical argument that a driver must be phase/time aligned to be "jointed", we just don't hear it that way. Usually it's a dispersion problem, distortion problem and/or a FR problem.
I am not arguing *against* time alignment. If a digital speaker weren't time/phase aligned, I'd be complaining about it - there's simply no downside or cost to do this in the digital domain. But with a 6dB/octave crossover, there are *multiple* downsides and if you can't hear them, buy such a design. I *can* hear it and every single 6dB/octave speaker I've heard looks far better on paper than it sounds and they tend to squeal like a pig when you turn them up. I attended a Thiel demo that was *horrible* because the tweeters (and metal midranges) were really distressing playing HT material. I had to leave. Vandersteens go from warm and polite to shrill when you turn them up. I had to sell a pair of Vandersteen 3As for $500 because *no one* would buy them because a certain $1000/pr retail speaker just plain sounded better to everyone that heard them (I sold a lot of $1000/pr speakers though!).
And then, of course, it costs more money to make a time aligned cabinet. I personally think Vandersteen is completely full of crap when they say their cabinet is so little to build. There's a *lot* more time and cost to build that than a simple V-cut/Fold box. Thiels are clearly expensive. I'm sure Meadowlarks are as well. But that impacts the performance/value. If you double the price to make a fancy cabinet, does the performance go up commensurately? Not usually. And, while a 1st order crossover *should* be a *very* simple design, check them out, they all have a ton of driver compensation in there. LOTS of stuff for the signal to pass through.
So, first order, time aligned, phase correct speakers have the following problems:
1. Increased cabinet costs
2. Extremely poor vertical dispersion
3. High cone woofer/midrange cone resonances
4. Increased driver distortion for midrange/tweeter
5. Limited dynamic range
6. Very limited sweetspot, vertically and horizontally
7. Increased crossover complexity and expense.
8. Limited choice of appropriate drivers for good performance
All to get ONE feature that is highly debated at best and subjectively not terribly significant unless you're predisposed to believe that this is the end all/be all of speaker design. If time/phase alignment comes with out cost, that is one thing. But to trade many areas of performance for an improvement in one makes no real sense. But it does add to the wide pallette of speakers available, I just don't think I'd dedicate a website to it because you're just asking for abuse
