Should we pay more attention to delays in sound?

That’s a remarkable measurement, didn’t know we didn’t know it.

3 things seem related

1. time alignment of frequencies, highs traveling a speck faster than lows. Some designers slope the face of their enclosures for this purpose. You can simply tilt/lean your flat faced speakers back to ’simply’ achieve that. It often directs the tweeters dispersion to your seated ear height, another benefit. Another benefit is the altered angle of reflections off room surfaces

2. cd players. most use a single DAC to process left/then right; left/then right ... I forget the speck of time delay this introduces, to EVERY l/r bit of conversion. To avoid this speck of time delay. better players provide separate L & R i.e. my first player, Onkyo had a matched pair of burr brown processors. Recent Oppo 105 has a pair of superior processors. I assumed, on that basis alone, the Oppo would beat my Sony Carousel. This (presumably) single processor Sony surprisingly sounds as good as both the Onkyo and Oppo. Thus, the l/r time difference of a single processor may be less than half a millisecond?

3. LP’s, analog. After nearly 50 years of attentive listening to Reel to Reel, 8 Tracks, Cassettes, home made cassettes made from LPs, LP’s, CDs and SACD:

My simple summation is that Analog ’Gets the Overtones Right’. Perfect time alignment to the fundamentals, perfect volume decay. Chopped Digital Re-construction is an amazing achievement, but many, my friends and I included find LP’s preferable to the CD version. I’ve cooked up ’somewhat blind, out of sight switching’ in the past, no matter what: everyone chooses LP over CD and Tube over SS.

Tannoy single driver designs produce a singular source of directionality, this is their design philosophy, and many like yourself like/prefer the results.

however, they are not time aligned.

high frequencies travel faster than low frequencies. time aligned speakers have the front faces slanted, or separate enclosure(s) for the upper mids and perhaps a separate enclosure for the tweeters, some super-tweeters. Those separate enclosures are staggered rearward from the face of the woofer and lower mids.

All this to have the highs ’start’ further back, so that at typical listening distances, they arrive ’time aligned’.

My JSE Infinite Slope Model 2’s were the most accurate speakers I owned. Aside from the steep crossover, excellent driver choices, ... the front panel was slanted for time alignment.

My current speakers are flat faced, I put a 1-1/2" block under the front edge, tilting the entire enclosure ’back’ for 3 reasons.

1. time alignment

2. tweeters dispersion becomes directly at seated ear height

3. angle of dispersion of all drivers, especially bass to floor, and everything off the rear wall is significantly altered, the complex mixture of reflections is mixed/weakened relative to the initial sound waves.

tilting a single driver can get the 2nd and 3rd benefits, but time alignment will not/cannot be achieved. It will not alter the fixed time alignment.