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Phase Distortion - Speaker/Amplifiers

I'm trying to get a better understanding of the impact that phase distortion has on the final sound quality and what is really going on in simple terms.

When I think of the phase relating to speakers my understanding isn't much beyond swapping the speaker wires around such that the left and right channels would be firing opposite of each other.

Bombaywalla tried to explain it in another thread, but I can't say that I understood it.
mceljo

Showing 2 responses by mceljo

mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 
It appears that phase distortion is primarily the result of crossover networks in multi driver speakers which is why headphones and single driver speakers have less phase distortion.

On the surface it seems that a network that results in 180 degrees (2nd order?) of phase distortion could be corrected by simply by reversing the wires on the driver itself. It must not be that simple.

Any audible difference results from the individual drivers not all firing at exactly the same time.

In all cases the amplifier is "seeing" the cumlative effect of entire speaker so what does an amplifier do with a phase shift? It seems that if an amplifier is really just transmitting a series of + and - pulses it's already operating at extremes so why would phase shifting matter?
mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 
I think I'm starting to understand a bit more.

I understand that the analog audio signal isn't a descrete set of 0's and 1's, but I thought the wave form resulted from "pulses" that either inreased or decreased the wave amplitude?
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