Seandtaylor99 is right about 2-way design constraint. 3-way or higher do offer drivers to operate in linear region where they are designed for. But like everyone knows, cross over is extremely complicated to design in 2-way already, 3-way is a million times more difficult. In electrical term, we called impedance because it's freq & phase combined.
You will also notice the best speaker on earth usually employee drivers from ONE manufacture. When manufacture design and build drivers, they apply their know-how from one to another and tend to behave similarly in electrical term. So designing a speaker with mulitiple drivers is easier when drivers are from one source.
Among all the speakers I have owned, my all time favorite were Sonus Faber Extrema & Dynaudio Confidence 5. A 2-way & a 3-way. Extrema got everything right, but C5 made everything better. So yes, a well designed 3-way can sound better than 2-way.
If adding a sub solve all the problems, I doubt manufactures can sell those $10k+ speakers as easily as they had. Till this day, I still haven't heard a sub that fully integrated to main speakers seamlessly. My last sub was a REL Stadium III and I ran it very conservatively (in volume) to make integration easier. Even then, I could still hear it from time to time.
You will also notice the best speaker on earth usually employee drivers from ONE manufacture. When manufacture design and build drivers, they apply their know-how from one to another and tend to behave similarly in electrical term. So designing a speaker with mulitiple drivers is easier when drivers are from one source.
Among all the speakers I have owned, my all time favorite were Sonus Faber Extrema & Dynaudio Confidence 5. A 2-way & a 3-way. Extrema got everything right, but C5 made everything better. So yes, a well designed 3-way can sound better than 2-way.
If adding a sub solve all the problems, I doubt manufactures can sell those $10k+ speakers as easily as they had. Till this day, I still haven't heard a sub that fully integrated to main speakers seamlessly. My last sub was a REL Stadium III and I ran it very conservatively (in volume) to make integration easier. Even then, I could still hear it from time to time.