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A Question About Time Alignment

I was reading a review of the Wilson Alex V on Stereophile recently. (Published just in time. I’m thinking about picking up a pair. Maybe a couple for the bedroom, too.) And it raised a long-standing question of mine, one that I hope the wiser minds on this site can answer. 
 

Wilson’s big selling point is aligning the different frequencies so they all reach your ear simultaneously. As I understand it, that’s why they have minute adjustments among the various drivers. The woofers put out bass notes that move slowly thanks to their long sound waves while the tweeters are playing faster moving, high frequency notes with short waves. Wilson lets you make adjustments so that they all arrive at the ear at once. 
 

It seems to me, however, that live music isn’t time aligned. Suppose I’m playing the piano and you’re sitting across the room. When I stretch out my left hand to hit the low notes, those notes travel along the same long, slow wavelengths as the notes from Wilson’s woofers. Similarly, the treble notes I play with my right hand move quickly through the short wavelengths. The notes from the piano are naturally out of alignment. If Wilson’s goal is to achieve a lifelike sound, aligning the frequencies doesn’t seem like the way to do it. 
 

Wilson has been selling lots of zillion dollar speakers for lots of years and people continue to gobble ‘em up. Something must be wrong with my line of reasoning. Would someone please point out where I’ve gone wrong? Nicely?

paul6001

Showing 3 responses by cd318

cd318
2,636 posts
 

Monopulse Loudspeakers here in the UK have made this time alignment issue their main selling point for decades.

The designer Allan Hendry has been stating that impulse precision is hard wired into our evolution for survival itself and thus it’s importance cannot be overstated.

Everytime I’ve listened to Monopulse speakers they did seem to be easy on the ear, very listenable for long durations. That led me to also wonder whether they are onto something.

If so, does that mean most others aren’t?

http://www.monopulse.co.uk/

 

cd318
2,636 posts
 

@soundscapemd

The acoustic centers of a cone midrange and a dome tweeter when both are mounted in the same plane (e.g., on a flat front of a speaker) will not be in the same plane. The tweeter would typically be ahead of the cone speaker.

 

Monopulse employ this mechanical way of aligning the drive units.

Others claim to be able to do it electrically via the crossover.

Some prefer to horn load their tweeters so that the tweeter is behind the physical plane of the woofer(s).

 

Time alignment might not be the be all end all of speaker design but I think it does help to reduce the so called ’listener fatigue’.

I remember reading that the more unnatural the sound is, the more tiring it is to listen to. The reason usually given is that your brain will have to engage in considerably more processing with those recordings that don’t sound authentic or genuine.

I would bet that this is particularly true when listening to a recording of the human voice.

 

cd318
2,636 posts
 

Even with my Dual Concentric Tannoy Berkeley’s where the pepperpot tweeter is located back into the mouth of the horn loaded 15 inch drivers the bass does sometimes seem to be slightly lagging behind the rest of the sound.

However, this may be due to cabinet resonance issues rather that drive unit alignment time differences.

Thankfully the Berkeley’s are said to crossover at 1kHz and thus everything above that should be aligned.

When it comes to low bass (sub 40 Hz) very few systems can match a good subwoofer for either clarity or power.

It can also be problematic to describe bass as either fast or slow but there’s no doubt that some systems can display superior attack and decay of bass notes than others.

And then there are those that don’t bother at all. In fact I’d guess that the bass response of the majority of loudspeakers starts to rapidly fall off the frequency response cliff below 50Hz.

In those instances, time alignment should hardly be an issue.

 

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