Sloped baffle

Bombaywalla, you've never designed anything, have you, or you would know what I said is true. A very poor speaker can be made that is still time coherent, and if you can't get that far in your brain you have little experience and education.

I have no doubt Roy is sincere and his efforts are genuine. I don't have enough information to intelligently debate his views either way. Beep is an interesting phenomena in itself.

I don't doubt his sincerity and efforts either. Some great products are made by such sincere guys making large efforts. And many more lousy ones are.

I'm going to seek them out for a listen.

Wasn't Jon Dalqhuist's DQ-10 an early attempt at time coherence? And, ditto, Wilson's Franken-speaker, the Whamm?
It's been so long since I heard either speaker I couldn't say how either stands up today. My concern, in theory, would be that multiple drivers, with a bunch of different crossovers, adds more complications to the affair. But, I guess, as they say, in practice, theory and practice aren't the same.

For a ubitiquous speaker that shows good time alignment, look no further than Vandersteen Model 2. A fair speaker for the price, but a hooded, somewhat grainy sound in the mids and highs with bass that sounds like a cardboard box. So time alignment it has. OK sound for the price. But nothing more than OK. If time alignment were so important, how can this speaker sound so ordinary, so mediocre?

Because extension matters, driver resonance matters, driver distortion matters, driver symmetry of motion matters, overall harmonic distortion matters, intermodulation distortion matters, box colorations matter......and we can go on and on.

So there you have a great example: a manufacturer that makes a barely passable (to my standards) time coherent speaker that I would never own, and he makes a fantastic, state of the art speaker that I would be happy to own. Any more demonstration needed that time coherence is not the most driving factor in the sound?