Is DEQX a game changer?


Just read a bit and it sure sounds interesting. Does it sound like the best way to upgrade speakers?
ptss
@Bob -- just wait until I home audition the DEQX. As seems to be the case with a great many audio issues, there is a divergence of opinion.

Yes ... on the hand, the time coherence opponents say that most people can't tell the difference between a time coherent speaker and one that is not time coherent. The naysayers may add that like all engineering problems, trade off are made. Perhaps there is greater flexibility in driver selection in the time incoherent space.

OTOH, folks like Bombaywalla, Roy Johnston, Rich Vandersteen, and the late Jim Thiel urge us fence sitters to drink the Kool-Aid. And as stated above, Roy has written some really good white papers that explain time coherence and why it so important.

At this point ... I am still sitting on the fence and will continue to do so until the US DEQX sale reps sets me up with a home demo.

So ... to my fellow fence sitters, hopefully sometime after Labor Day I will be able to post my reactions.

Cheers

BIF
08-21-14: Bob_reynolds
Bruce, thanks for the additional insight. Is there a reason that most speakers on the market are not time coherent? I think so -- it's way down on the list for impacting sonics. Meadowlark claimed to be in the time coherent school and published a nice looking triangle graph. They didn't sound time coherent to me, i.e., I couldn't tell that they were or weren't. Things that have a large impact on frequency response like room correction will definitely be audible. So, time coherence may be DEQX's selling point, but that won't be reason enough for me to be interested.
Bob, you couldn't be more wrong about time-coherence & it's importance to music playback.
Most speaker designers simply do not understand the math & physics to make a speaker time-coherent so they skip this part totally.
For the Meadowlarks you might have known how to set-up the speaker &/or what to listen for to ensure that you were seated in the right location to hear the time-coherence. Plus, guidance could have been poor from the manuf.

I would strongly urge you, as Al already has, to read that "Sloped Baffle" thread he provided the link to & search for DEQX & read other things about time-coherence. I believe it will be educational to you.

BTW, there is atleast one member in that thread, lewinskih01, who is using DEQX & has found it to be transformational in his system - it made his speakers trend more towards the time-coherence paradigm than before & he is pleased with the results (so he wrote).
whatever makes your speakers more time-coherent will make your listening even better.

And, if your system pix are the latest, I see that you are doing atleast 1 aspect of the time-coherence thing: time-alignment of drivers. You have your tweeters pointed out on both channels. This makes the path length from the tweeter a bit longer compared to the woofer which has the effect of time-aligning the acoustical centers of those 2 drivers. That helps to intergrate the sound of the drivers at the listening position.
So, if this is any clue to me, you are going to like a time-coherent speaker even more.
That "sloped baffle" thread is a good one to read. I 3rd Almarg & Bifwynne on your reading that thread.....
Gotta tell ya. Getting the DEQX audition arranged up has been a frustrating PITA. I'll be generous and attribute it to the summer time and vacations. But if it's half as good as it's hyped, it is an important tweak that serious audiophiles should be thinking about.

As I said, hopefully, shortly after labor day and I'll have something to report.

If DEQX doesn't do a better job of getting a more responsive dealer network established, I fear crash and burn.

I'll have more to say after the audition.

@Bob ... time coherence is not just pure BS. Manufacturers make design decisions based on pluses and minuses. I don't enough about the engineering or the cost accounting math to weigh in. But I'm sure that if top companies like Focal, Revel and Magico could figure out a way to push the square peg into the round hole and solve every problem, they would do it.

It's all about trade offs. Poor Roy Johnson and GMA. I showed my exterminator a pic of Roy's top of the line speakers, and he was ready to pull DTT out of his truck. LOL!!

I'll be back.
Bifwynne, Even though such an experiment on the surface might appear to provide a correct time / incorrect time value check with everything else being relatively the same: and on the one hand I don't want to discourage your experiment(heck, I'm curious too), but, on the other hand I'm not sure the DEQX by by itself is the ideal way to determine how important wave fidelity is. I would be concerned that unless the speakers were designed from the start towards those aspirations they might not be hospitable to the demands made upon them by such manipulations. The DEQX might(?) actually be in conflict with the speakers designs intentions.
Perhaps, I'm mistaken, but don't think Bob is too far off course here with the idea that a speaker designed from the get go for wave fidelity combined with digital room correction might be the ideal way to go. I suspect that the future might yet provide for digital signal corrected for room considerations into digital cross-overs into class D amps into individual drivers that might provide the ultimate fidelity for listeners in real rooms.