someone enlighten me as to the benefits of Time alignment
In a car, the left and right speakers are a different distance away from your ears. This means the sounds emanating from one side will reach your ears at a slightly different time than will the other side. This difference is very slight, considering the speed of sound, and the relatively short differences in distances. But it is still enough to cause imaging problems with your speakers (hurts their ability to create a realistic sound stage).
Time alignment is sometimes called 'delay' because it allows you delay the signal to certain speakers in order to make up this difference in distance to your ears. Basically the closest speaker (to you) in your system gets no delay, all the others get a delay corresponding to the difference in distance they present.
Even move around the room when you have a home stereo playing, and find that centered between the two speakers is the 'sweet spot' where the music seems to not only increase in intensity, but also widens out and surrounds you? T/A helps move that sweet spot to the driver's seat, even though you are not sitting equal distance from each speaker.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, there is no replacement for equal path lengths however (speakers physically mounted an equal distance away), as there are more cues to creating a realistic sound stage than simply timing (equalized intensity and speaker phase, to name two). This is why SQ guys these days tend to mount their front stage speakers in kick panels, as this does not move the passeneger side speakers that much further away from the driver's seat/listener, but it does increase the distance from the driver's side speakers, there by helping to better equalize path lengths (although still not perfect).
Hope that helps.
