Duddley:
The PARC is designed to do one thing and one thing only--deal with room modes. We wanted to keep everything in the signal path as simple as possible (but not simplier). Thus, we do not address time alignment issues, nor do we operate on the full audio bandwidth--bass only. There are two areas that one might want to apply time alignment to. One is a poorly designed speaker that requires additional processing, and quite honestly most high quality speakers now are designed with cross-over and drivers that do not have this problem. The other occurs from room interactions and is far too great for any device to deal with properly. Even if it could, it could only do it for one very specific spot in the room. TacT will admit that the time alignment issue is not terribly relevant, but since the data is in the digital domain, and they have to do some time alignment to compensate for the digital convolution filters, why not allow the user to adjust it as well.
How do we avoid injecting phase incoherence in analog? Quite simply we don't. It's impossible and is the laws of the type of electrical circuit necessary to do parametric equalization. It's a direct function of the Q (width) and attenuation. There are two types of phase distortion that can be caused. One is cascading and one is indepedent. We use an independent designed filter. The phase shift is maximum at the center pole but is not changed outside of the bandwidth. Initially this was a big concern of mine, but after extensive listening and testing on very high resolution systems we discovered that we could not detect phase shifting with notch filters (attenuation only). We could detect the phase shift when the Q was relatively narrow (greater than 4) and the boost was greater than 6 db. The PARC is to deal with room modes only and thus does not allow for a boost, only attentuation.
Calanctus: That's not quite right. The TacT can work with these formats, but it's going to take their analog outputs (not native digital format), then run them through an A/D, then process the new digital signal, then another D/A. So you can do it, but it's very convoluted and not a very pure way of dealing with these high resolution formats, you will lose much of the detail and ambience of these higher resolution formats with the additional conversion and processing.
In either case--hearing is believing. Please do take time to listen to a unit, whether it's an in home audition (best) or at a dealer or at HE 2003.
