The impact of phase coherence is hard to communicate and harder to prove. In fact, the industry at large has proven to its satisfaction that it doesn't matter. I have spoken here about the personal experience and psychoacoustic study surrounding why I judge it to matter deeply.
The odd jujitsu is that the human auditory brain is so good at assembling-synthesizing known tonal sounds from the transient impulse data stream . . . that in an intellectual way, we enjoy the decoding process which we call hearing.
For myself, and the small minority of those who 'get it', there is a direct path to the core being when that sonic analysis-reassembly is not necessary, when the unadulterated musical signal arrives as natural sound. As Andy says, and as the physics supports, and psychoacoustics agrees, there is only one way to accomplish that direct stream in a multiple driver system: first order crossover slopes.
Now, the cat's meow would be to have drivers with broad enough range of resonance-free operation that the phase coherent wave-front could be coupled with a ripple-free frequency domain response. By the way, a larger budget would permit additional driver resonance control and more fine-tuned frequency response to get the best of both worlds. I believe that Jim's 0.7 drivers have that potential - the midrange goes beyond 20K without breakup and so forth and so on. It would take a visionary designer with youth on his side to continue Jim's work to get those results.
Magico and others at the expensive high end get various aspects very right. But as you say, for those who have tuned in to the joys of phase coherence, there is always still something missing in non-coherent designs.
The odd jujitsu is that the human auditory brain is so good at assembling-synthesizing known tonal sounds from the transient impulse data stream . . . that in an intellectual way, we enjoy the decoding process which we call hearing.
For myself, and the small minority of those who 'get it', there is a direct path to the core being when that sonic analysis-reassembly is not necessary, when the unadulterated musical signal arrives as natural sound. As Andy says, and as the physics supports, and psychoacoustics agrees, there is only one way to accomplish that direct stream in a multiple driver system: first order crossover slopes.
Now, the cat's meow would be to have drivers with broad enough range of resonance-free operation that the phase coherent wave-front could be coupled with a ripple-free frequency domain response. By the way, a larger budget would permit additional driver resonance control and more fine-tuned frequency response to get the best of both worlds. I believe that Jim's 0.7 drivers have that potential - the midrange goes beyond 20K without breakup and so forth and so on. It would take a visionary designer with youth on his side to continue Jim's work to get those results.
Magico and others at the expensive high end get various aspects very right. But as you say, for those who have tuned in to the joys of phase coherence, there is always still something missing in non-coherent designs.