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Otherwise I'd suggest by starting with the room and build/design in a suitable hornloaded array for LF with a true 20Hz horn and suitable (options) for the midrange/high frequency arrays. Something like multiple Oris 150's as lower midrange and a 2" Compression driver equipped spherical horn for the upper mids plus some form of supertweeter system might work great. The room should of course follow the use of fortuitous numbers in it's geometry, have maybe a cathedral ceiling and a horsehair plaster over wood consytruction.
Back to "it has to fit into existing rooms but it can cost quite a bit of money.
Truth 1: The actual woofer system between 30....50Hz to around 150...300Hz should be (must be?) dipolar to minimise room interaction. Below this you can apply a sealed woofer system. The upper boundary is set either by the lower boundary of the directivity control of the Mid/Hi Array or the beginning of the (IIRC) sabine region in the rooms modal behaviour where individual room modes are no longer observable and the sound field becomes diffuse.
A pair of 21" or 24" pro audio woofers can be adapted to operate well in such an LF system (unipole) if the lower midrange and upper bass array shows a good directivity control.
Truth 2: The system covering the formant range and lower treble must have constant and fairly well defined directivity. Failure to control directivity tightly will promote the rooms ambient sound over that of the recording, often eliminitaing recording ambinence. Extreme examples of how not do it is Bose 901, Shainian, other omnidirectional system and most ribbon/magneplanar/electrostatic dipoles.
A large horn or large format coaxial driver (of the Tannoy Style type it should be added, meaning using the cone as hornextension) on a dipole can fulfill the above requirement well, shop at Tannoy or Pro Audio. Another option is something like a Oris 150 or 200 horn with a suitable driver, somewhat reminiscent of Avant Garde.
Truth 3: There is an inherent link between distortion, compression and sensitivity. Low sensitivity invariably means relatively high distortion and compression, though high sensitivity does not gurantee low distortion and compression it is a good pointer, together with some other pointers.
This in effect excludes any "High Fidelity" driver of the common kind from use. Pro and Pro Studio Drivers become a fundamental requirement.
It should also be obvious that a fairly large number of drivers and ways comes into this. My proposal for a well designed "domestic monitor system looks a little like this:
Infrawoofer (aka Subwoofer/Superwoofer etc.), largest format driver available and affordable in small sealed enclosure, equalised in ELF or Linkwitz fashion. Minimum dual Pro Audio 18" , preferable 21" to 24", optimal Fostex 32" Driver mounted into wall using another room as rear chamber.
Woofer, large format driver on dipole, fundamental resonance around 30Hz, electronically equalised with it's own Amplifier, active. Crossover should allow blending with the upper bass unit without requiring high slope higpass filtering on the Upper bass unit. A 21" to 24" unit seems desirable, 18" may suffice.
Lower Mid, large format coaxial Cone section, preferably in vestigal front horn (waveguide). This should be allowed to be driven passive and any dipole LF rolloff and Driver losses due to excessively low Qt (if present) should be equalised by manipulating the crossover slope of the Woofer, to use the woofer as "fill in".
Upper Mid, medium to large format compression driver in coaxial frame, coaxial cone profile forming horn extension. A 1" driver is mandatory, a 2" exit 4" Vocie coil driver seems perferable, ideally a low compression ratio driver is used.
Coaxials comming to mind are Tannoy, Various Beyma, Ciare, P.Audio and others, 12" to 15".
The crossover between woofer and compression driver should be low slope (ideally 1st order with the HF section reverting to 2nd order below the compression drivers natural resonance) and the horizontal offset between Driver and Cone system should be corrected. This suggests a digital, active crossover system though other methodes (passive) exist.
Finally, compression drivers invariably struggle above around 8..10KHz, so rather than attempting to equalise the topend flat add a supertweeter. Ribbon, Horn, active, passive, the options are infinite.
That is my take on a nice domestic monitor grade speaker, which minimises it's interaction with the roiom and is not materially limited by distortion and compression at any more or less desirable or feasible SPL, something which if well implemented one may call a "blameless" speaker.
Active Multiamplification with Valve (SE?) Amplifiers for the lower and upper mid seems desirable, big, hugely powerfull Solid State amplifiers for the LF sections, probably digital aka Tripath et al.
A somewhat more sensible solution could incoporate a plate Amp (modified) for the woofer and use a passive crossover for Coaxial Driver and supertweeter, making the whole thing in essence stand alone. The extra Infra Woofer can then be a stand alone cabinet (coffee table?). Such a system could be made relatively compact, the main pannels would need to be no larger than 2' X 3' 6" and not very deep.
Sayonara [/B]
