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Is audiophile bullshit cheating?
(lemmy.world)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

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So I’m someone who actually designs and deploys speakers in large scale applications like arenas and performance halls. There is some truth to making all of the frequencies arrive at the same time based on your listening spot. However the “peak of an average waveform” is bullshit. The reason why time alignment is a thing is because of 2 reasons.
Is any of this important? No. Sound (any wave really) will merge with other frequencies and produce a unified wave as long as the drivers are close enough together. So as long as the distance between the tweeter and the woofer is within half of the wavelength of the crossover frequency, it literally does not matter. The crossover’s between the tweeter’s and the woofer’s in most speakers are typically within 800-2.4khz, or 17”-5.6” (43cm-14cm) in wavelength. As long as your drivers are within that distance of each other the sound will converge.
And if it wasn’t, we can delay the electrical signal in the amplifier to make it all line up!!
As someone who designs audio equipment, I hate audiophiles, they make a mockery of my profession.