Single way or multiway


The founder and builder of the highly respected high-end speaker company Gauder AkustikDr. Gauder, says that using a full-range driver is very bad. He uses 3- to 4-way speakers with extremely complex 10th-order crossovers consisting of 58–60 components.

In contrast, some other well-known and equally respected speaker companies — such as Voxativ, Zu, Cube Audio, and Totem — use crossoverless designs.

Who is right, and who is wrong?

bache

Showing 1 response by dynacohum

One of the leading proponents of a single full range speaker element with no crossover are Pearl Acoustics and Mark Audio.  Both keep the driver fairly small to preserve some high frequency dispersion and so give up deepest bass extension. 

Fritz, Totem, and maybe others have made 2-ways with "capacitorless series crossovers" to closely approach the ideal of a full range driver without the loss of high frequency extension and dispersion.  

The EPI 100 and all its siblings used a single cap to attenuate lows to the inverted 1" paper dome...couldn't be simpler!

The Walsh driver found in the Ohm A, F, and more recently German Physics' DDD driver, which to my knowledge use no crossover components, yet achieve full range and omnidirectional coverage.

The Infinite Slope and Gauder approach is the other end of the spectrum.