ac0j...
I see the breakdown in communications as this:
You're intelligent, of this I have no doubt. You're not smart. Please let me finish, I don't want you to think I mean that at completely face value. Smart listens, and is willing to accept things that can be proven. I haven't seen this quality of you, yet. Your age notwithstanding, (I am almost the same age - an '86 grad) listen. I learn something new everyday, because I listen.
There's no denying the above, however, you are certainly playing with fire when you attempt to challenge DYohn to any kind of electrical or acoustic theory war... This is not "defending" DYohn, per se, he needs no defense by me; I've met the man, and if you actually graduated in 81, a mere "few" years before I did, then you are still "a bit" younger than DYohn... (Sorry, Dave.) He has a cirriculum vitae as long as my arm, and has worked with the US Government developing undersea infrasonic communications systems, amongst other (at the time) very "hush hush" electrical and acoustic stuff. Read his (and my) bio(s). A loudspeaker designer from your elementary school days (I promise you this) and possibly one of the smartest guys I've ever had the pleasure of dining at Todai with. (Todai is an all you can eat Asian/American food buffet in the Bay Area, if it matters.) A close personal friend of Dan Wiggins, possibly one of the foremost loudspeaker designing minds of this generation, DYohn knows more about system design than nearly anybody here (<ego booster> He HAS admitted to not understanding Transmission Line theory as well as I do, however... </ego booster>)
The breakdown is not knowing when to just listen. Really.
As stated, electricity travels at .8c in a wire (althought I thought it was closer to .95c) c, the velocity of light, is 186,282 miles per SECOND. That's 983,568,960 feet per second! Electricity therefore, travels at 149,025 miles per second in a wire, or 786,855,168 feet per second. SIX TIMES AROUND THE EARTH (at the equator) IN ONE SECOND!!! We're not discussing losses, here, we're talking a zero-current, charged-to-a-given-potential, wire. (Losses do not affect the speed of the electricity anyway.) If, for example, you had 100, 200-Ohm, 18 inch woofers, connected in parallel, we would have approximately 150 feet of wire to travel through, from the amplifier terminals to the very end woofer. For electricity to travel one foot in a wire, it will take .00000000127 seconds. For that same impuse to travel 150 feet, it would take 0.0000001905 seconds. That's 19.05 PICOSECONDS!!! PICO, baby... 190 ten-thousandths of one millisecond! There is absolutely ZERO way that any dynamic driver cone can EVER react so quickly that you would ever even be able to MEASURE the difference, let alone HEAR the difference in acoustic output impulse. None. It will not ever happen! You are not hearing any acoustic waveform smudging, simply attributable to the number of woofers connected.
Now, this being laid out in hard, fast, scientifically explainable and PROVABLE phrases, I will concede that IF you are indeed hearing acoustic waveform smudging, it is because you are running your voice coils in series-parallel, or even in straight series... This, I will grant you, will increase the inductance within the series portions of the circuits. Inductance can cause "slow" response in a voice coil, and wiring a significant number of them in series could possibly cause a smudging. However, (and ignoring the resistance portion of a dynamic loudspeaker for the moment) if you have in parallel branches, an equal number of branches, (2sX2p, 3sX3p, 4sX4p, etc...) then the overall inductance of the circuit will be identical to one woofer, and thus the inductance becomes a non-issue, and there will be no difference in impulse response... There simply CANNOT be.
If your mistake is wiring too many woofers in series, then try a different wiring scheme, OR start with higher impedance woofers, and wire down to your desired impedance using PARALLEL wiring, not series wiring.
Back-EMF, you say? Nope, I still don't buy that. The output devices in the amplifier have a FAR lower impedance than all of the woofers combined. The back-EMF will want to be shorted through the amp. Tube amplifiers, POSSIBLY, but still not a noticeable acoustic smearing directly attributable to back-EMF.
Long story short, Try a different wiring scheme, and use more parallel resistances than series resistances, and start with drivers that offer the lowest inductance (rated in mH) and highest impedance (rated in Ohms) you can find.