Some years ago I read an AES paper on the subject of vertical imaging. They did experiments where different tones were played though a stack of small speakers hidden behind a curtain. The tone would be played through just one speaker, which the listener couldn't see, and the listener was asked to judge the height of the sound source.
What they found is that people mis-heard low frequencies as coming from lower than they actually did, and mis-heard high frequencies as coming from higher than they actually did. And in the midrange region, around 1 kHz, people were very good at judging the height of the sound source. Hmmmm.
Another mechanism may come into play with the Consequence, and that is the ear/brain's tendency to localize sound sources based on the first-arrival sound. With the Consequence, the first sound to reach the listener's ears will be that originating at ear height, and the driver that's at seated ear height is the one that's covering the 1 kHz region. Maybe Dynaudio's engineers read the same paper I did. Heck, maybe they wrote it!
Finally, I've heard the Consequence on a couple of occasions (in large rooms), and seated with eyes closed I couldn't tell that the highs are coming from down low, and the lows are coming from up high. Now this illusion may collapse at close range, where the angles are exaggerated, but at medium to long listening distances (reasonable to expect with such big speakers), the angles are not as large, and the psychoacoustics works as the studies predict.
Incidentally, that big isobaric woofer section has a lot of slam going on.
Duke
dealer/manufacturer
