Sure, they don’t exactly advertise the fact. And, when pressed, most makers of time incoherent speakers will sidestep the issue in a way that will remind you of your least favorite politician. But think about this: if a mike, or a cable or a player, preamp or amp were to wipe out timing information in exactly the same way that most speakers do, they would not even be considered to be poor performers; they would be called ‘broken’.

It is my view, and I hope to convince you of this, that timing liberties are the artistic province of musicians alone - and are certainly NOT to be taken by that box of wire, wood and metal that are your speakers.

Though the engineering concepts can get a bit involved, there are two basic ideas that combine to determine a speaker's performance in the time domain. These are: physical acoustic alignment of the drivers, and time domain perturbations induced by the crossover circuit. These concepts are discussed in detail our website - and you may end up having questions that are addressed there, but, for our purposes today, we will 'cut to the chase' and simply show you - via animation - what goes on in the often ignored, yet crucial time domain.