Single way or multiway

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.  

as a dealer for over 30 years our perspective our this question is simple

we have never experienced a single driver speaker worth owning the reason is simple you need a proper high frequency driver to produce clean and airy high frequencies and in the history of audio we have been moving into better and better tweeters from paper to plastics to metal domes to damped metal to ribbons and AMTs 

as long as the tweeter is well matched with a properly implemented  crossover you can create a seamless totally transparent music reproducer 

Dave and Troy

audio intellect NJ

My take is that the simpler the design the better. The intrinsic problems of single driver systems are pretty obvious. Asking a single driver to reproduce the entire spectrum is simply not possible. Having said this the midrange of the some of the best single driver speakers I have heard were spectacular. 

I am not an expert, but an extremely complex high order crossover with a great many components is precisely the direction I dont think one should go. A patently bad idea. The designers choice of drivers may necessitate such a design.

Crossovers are inherently subtractive.

I think putting this on the scale of right and wrong may not be productive. 

I encourage audiophiles to experiment on the cheap!  Madisound has a number of single "full range" drivers and kits for sale.  Rather than try to come to a definitive universal answer, build some of these kits and see how much fun they are. :) 

Every design of well,....everything is just a collection of compromises.  Something has to give in order for something else to be better.  If a design is as close to a no-compromise approach as possible, then what is given up is costs involved to make said design.

In other words, neither design is right or wrong.  Just pick which makes you happier when you listen to music.