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.
Single way or multiway
The founder and builder of the highly respected high-end speaker company Gauder Akustik, Dr. 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?
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@ditusa wrote:
+1 With a low sensitivity speaker segment however you can only go so far macro dynamically with a 2-way design, and they’re typically LF-restricted due to the need for a smaller woofer/midrange to "meet" with a direct radiating dome tweeter above that can only be crossed so low (used as a direct radiator not much lower than 2kHz). As an exception to this "rule" the now sadly discontinued speaker brand, S.P. Technology, made an interesting 2-way design based on a ~10" waveguide loading a low fs 1" dome tweeter, and a 8" Seas Excel woofer/midrange (arguably mostly a woofer). Their largest model, the some 6’ tall floor standing Revelation, sported two of the 8" Seas woofers flanking the waveguide in a d’Appolito configuration and a kind of quasi horn-loading of the woofers. The crossover frequency sat in the 700-800Hz region, very low for a dome tweeter, but aided by the waveguide that "relieves" the dome tweeter in its lower spectrum in a progressive, nonlinear fashion. These speakers were essentially and honestly full-range and played down to 20Hz clean - a very impressive feat for at 2-way, lower sensitivity design - and they sounded wonderful to boot, though presented a hideously difficult load to the amp in their passively configured form (they were developed with the Crown Studio Reference 1 amps). It’s very different of course with the high sensitivity segment of speakers, like your JBL 4435’s, that allows the use of large woofer/mids in conjunction with a horn + compression driver combo that can cross over lower than 1kHz. Different challenges design-wise, but a potentially much more capable package overall as a 2-way (or 2 1/2-way with your JBL's) design - not least actively configured :) |