Time alignment, important? long
Sound wave certainly does not travel at the same speed for all frequencies, but music recording and reproduction often neglect this fact. Take recording for example, distance of a microphone will have strong effect on how the sound will emerge and be recorded. Say standing one meter from a jazz band vs. 5 meters from the band, you do expect bass to show up slightly slower when standing further from the band much like lightening appears much earlier than thunder. Since not too many recording is done with single microphone, the recording engineer further complicates this result.
One group of speaker designers stresses this issue by “time align” the drivers, this is usually done by tilting the face back (Thiel, Meadowlark) or move the higher freq drivers back in vertical plane (Dunlavy, Vandersteen). Consider a speaker driver generates a range of frequency, moving the higher freq drivers back in vertical plane does NOT align in time domain since 3000 Hz sound will still arrive at your ear earlier than 100 Hz which is generated by the same midrange driver. So that leaves tilting the face as the only viable solution to correctly time align drivers. However, how many speakers actually have identical tilt angle? In theory, delay vs. freq should be a constant value and all speakers that claim to be time aligned SHOULD have the same tilt angle.
Now come the bigger questions. I hear people praising Merlin, Dynaudio, and Maggie constantly, I have first hand experience with most of them and could not agree more, but none of them is time aligned! Music recording is not done in time align fashion whether single or multi microphones are used. On top, every instrument generates not one single freq, but a range of freq, so microphone actually is receiving the sound with time delay in all instances.
Is that a coincidence the aforementioned brands are well received because they PURPOSELY do not time align their speakers to properly reproduce the time difference captured by recording or they sound great because of other factors? Will they sound better if they were tilted back at an exact angle to time align the drivers? If so, why haven’t any owner done that. Or better yet, why haven’t the manufactures done that?
What's your take on this time alignment theory?
