tuga
Legal Alien
I struggle to even stay in the room with large widely spaced-out moving coil cone speakers on a tall baffle, e.g. large Wilsons, JM Labs etc. They make me feel ill, and I’m sure it is the phase/time issues of so many drivers fighting a room from so many places. That and the crazy heavy high-mass ported cabs storing and releasing energy. Sit me in front of a pair of ESL63s and I just relax and enjoy the music as everything is happening in time and without the dissection of multi-driver speakers. Very large Tannoys have ended up as my favoured compromise as they have most of the coherence and timing of Quads, but with far better dynamic ability and scale. Beyond that my taste is very, very small speakers with the drivers as close to a point source as possible and no porting, e.g. LS3/5As etc. They’ll never have the dynamics, ease or scale of ESLs, let alone Tannoys, but they have a coherence that is entirely missing for me with large multi-driver speakers. I am sure this is a time domain thing.
With Wilson and Focal demos it has been a mix of overly-loud sound and astringent treble (Wilson used Focal tweeters in the past), and I agree in regard to port sound except when the tuning is overdamped and the frequency is low enough (≥30Hz).
I am not so convinced about your time-domain theory, but some people are more sensitive to this, both with speakers and with digital filter (linear vs. minimum phase).
One of my most memorable listening eperiences is of an afternoon spent listening to ESL63s w/ Gradient subs, a system which mostly overcomes the former's shortcomings.