Tech That Flopped!

The Ampeg SVT bass amp, for years the gold standard for bass players, is certainly not a sloppy-sounding bass reflex design, but a clean sealed one. Recordings of it with a Fender P-Bass plugged into it sound great on my speakers and subs.

Well, the problem with "time aligned" speakers like Thiele, etc. is that they.... really aren't.  Yes, you can put a microphone at some position and get the direct sound pressure from all drivers to arrive at the same time there.  But only the acoustically naiive believe that only the sound coming directly from a driver to your ear is what matters -- most of the sound energy gets to you by other paths, and its effect is far from irrelevant.  The number of loudspeaker designs that are "time aligned" or "phase coherent" toward other targets than straight ahead is very very small.

^Given proper spacing and ergo time delays, the ear/brain can discriminate between original and delayed reflected sound. As few in options as they might be, most of the better known speakers with this capability are designed with rather wide such dispersion characteristics.

Speaking of delay, whatever happened to digital time delay? Did it do the old floperino? Audio Pulse Model One. Yeah, Buddy!

 Eric, first let me say that despite what might appear to be a pattern of antagonistic responses from me to your posts, I really do look forward to your contributions and respect your opinions, whether I fully agree with them or not. :-)
 As hwy61 had already mentioned in this thread; can one dismiss a product like Vandersteens venerable model 2 as niche' product? I suspect that speakers like Dunlavy, Thiel and Vandersteen ( include Quad 63's ?)  have had sizable high end market shares for a considerable length of time.