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 2 responses by mulveling

Most engineers will place various solutioning strategies on a spectrum between "simple" and "complex", while understanding the tradeoffs of different approaches. When given a choice, most engineers will pick somewhere in the middle, for most applications - that would be your classic 2-ways, simple MTM's etc. 

But then SOME guys like to make a habit of slamming hard into ONE side of the spectrum, for whatever reason. They’re usually either true geniuses or sociopaths - sometimes both, but more often just the latter, unfortunately. Holy cow, "10th order crossovers" etc is leaning very, very hard into the side of high electrical complexity (crossover) and acoustic complexity (coherent combination of the multiple drivers). 

That approach seems "gross" to me personally, but there’s also really no wrong answer here. The single-driver guys also have to deal with complexity, in the form of how to get decent bass without adding a separate subwoofer section - and THAT often involves very large & complex cabinetry - a different domain of complexity, but complexity to be sure. Sometimes you have better tools & tech to manage one form of complexity than the other, and that should drive your choices. Traditionally, the favor was to big & complex cabinets - but now with high shipping & labor costs (complex horn cabinets), computer aided crossover design, and advanced digital signal processing, maybe there’s something to the 10th order crossover approach... 

My "more in the middle" choice was for Tannoys’ dual-concentric drivers. 

A well executed two way speaker can deliver excellent sound reproduction. 😎

Absolutely! It's really the sweet spot of "managed complexities". Kind of hard to mess it up and get bad sound - you almost have to be TRYING.