Jeremyjo wrote:It's fooling oneself to think of the impulse response of a line array as having no phase interface, distortion, aberration etc, e.
Again, the oddities happen in the vertical plane, and our ears are oriented horizontally. With line arrays, you simply don't hear the comb filtering.
every listener point will have multiple arrivals from the many elements of the array. That "smears" or "spreads" the impulse response out over time
This is why array design and driver spacing is so very important. If the drivers are close enough to acoustically couple, the time differential isn't audible, but rather is part of the constructive interference which creates the line array effect. IOW, you aren't hearing multiple individual drivers, but the effect of all the drivers coupled together.