Which sounds better 2 way or 3 way speaker design

It depends on the design. There are pros and cons with each, but there are a lot of outstanding 2-way speakers.  They're simpler and can typically offer higher quality parts because there’s simply fewer of them to buy. Because of they can be built for less, many are indeed marketed to the more affordable price ranges, but a TOTL 2-way can still be amazing, depending on the recipe used.  

With that said, there are a lot of great sounding 3-way + speakers out there too. Keep an open mind, buy what you like, and what works in your room on your system, and you won’t go wrong.

@rauliruegas

Dear @kjl1065 : Everything the same 3-way is a superior MUSIC reproduction where a 2-way ( almost any. ) has a way higher Intermodulation Distortions that per sé goes against MUSIC in front of the 3-way design.

There’s never a free lunch. You stated a potential benefit from choosing a 3-way design, but there’s a flip side.

A 3-way system typically puts a crossover point (a series capacitor) in the 300-800hz region, and it induces any associated delay and degradation from the capacitor. That’s right square in the middle of the vocal range, which covers the primary music range of a lot of instruments. All things the being the same, that’s most definitely a theoretical disadvantage to at least some aspects of the sound.

Every speaker designer faces lots of those choices. Dealing with all those pros and cons, is simply a matter of picking your poison, and mitigating it as much as possible, but no design is immune.

The crossover design is critical with both 2-way and multiway speakers, but it’s considerably more difficult to achieve balance and coherency with more than two drivers. If the objective is for the speaker to be able recreate a music wave realistically, with all harmonics intact, the wave has to have a consistent shape and amplitude, and the correct phase and timing whether it’s coming from one driver or multiple drivers....the more drivers you add, the more difficult it becomes to recreate that music wave and have it replicate the original.

Single driver speakers have appeal because of their simplicity and lack of a need for crossovers to shape the sound to reproduce a music wave. Their phase coherency is excellent, and they tend to have less smearing and latency caused by crossover components. Their downside is that when frequencies that are smaller in diameter than the driver, those small frequencies tend to beam straight ahead, and have poor off-axis performance. The larger the driver, the more beaming.

There is always a downside to every option, but the marketing hype leaves that part out. Thus opinions that are formed based on the same marketing hype tend to echo only the upside, unaware of the disadvantages. Making an assumption that more drivers are better, is similar to saying more salt is better in all recipes.

@toddalin 

I said ~80 Hz for the bottom of the midrange because the idea is to keep at least the fundamentals of the human voice within one driver and there are those who can certainly sing lower than that.

100% agree with this. Having the fundamental frequencies of vocal range produced by a single driver offers better coherency than splitting it between a woofer and midbass/midrange driver.  Of all the speakers I’ve designed, this philosophy sounds best to me. There are always other factors, but this makes more sense to me than installing a crossover in the middle of the vocal region… the vast majority of instruments also play in the same range, so it affects a lot of music. YG Acoustics offers some models that use similar logic.