A 12" sub with twice the excursion will equal a 15". But if you're considering 18" or 2 15"s, you must not have any typical home set up, rather some huge room?
Physics dictates there is always some driver overhang and the bigger you get, the more you can run into that.
I run at about 85-88 db, but hey bigger amps 🙂
Maybe look at Blast King...18" subs!
https://blastkingusa.com/
I use a woofer that match the efficiency of the mid.
first order xo systems need to use drivers that without even xo already "match" together, so a 15" that is about 97 db efficient is ideal with a 95 db mid...
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I'm looking at some large and expensive studio monitors, and I wonder, why are they so large? Why do they have two of everything, and at least three ways? My immediate thought is that it is for power handling - they simply need to be LOUD. Is there any sound quality benefit to these designs at 80 dB volume? Or could we remove the duplicate drivers (still leaving the three bands, of course), and have the exact sound quality at lower levels? I'm thinking that more drivers = shorter excursion = better linearity, but at the same time these MTM designs have known drawbacks as well.
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Yeah a 12" will keep up at twice the excursion, and for that you pay the price in power compression, distortion, and non linearity in the drivers, so it's not a free tradeoff either.
Klippel testing etc shows very well the non linearity in drivers at high excursion, and very few are made to a quality that is impressive past a few mm of excursion.
There is always compromises to be made, and Hoffmans Iron law still applies.
In your case your mainly looking to trade loss in efficiency for smaller enclosures, that's one compromise and i guess the most common in todays 'hifi as size, design and WAF is often more a deciding factor then the rest, so it is the senseful way to go for a large manufacturer looking to sell in high quantities.
Wether it's the right or best approach, is a discussion that will never die so each to his own.
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yes, 15" woofers in large cabinets make their presence known at 80db, even at 60db. thats the advantage of HE, it sounds good at low spl.
"more drivers = shorter excursion = better linearity,"
but the point to use a 15" is to match a mid. the goal is simplicity
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Main studio monitors are sized to play clean at loud levels often in fairly large rooms. Midfield monitors is the jargon for speakers sized to play clean at standard levels in rooms typically found in the home. The Neumann KH 420 is a well designed example with plenty of supporting information on the website. There are similar speakers from other manufacturers like Genelec.
I couldn't disagree more regarding a budget-end DIY 2-way using a 5.25" midwoofer. Mine, a Jeff Bagby designed Piccolo, uses just such a midwoofer and sounds excellent in a rather small room listening in the near field.
And this is far from being true:
"In order for an expensive 2 way or small 3 way to be relevant requires the objective to be something other than maximising high fidelity in a room at standard levels."
I would put my $450 DIY kit up against any commercially manufactured 2-way costing 5 to 10 times as much. I say that having auditioned many speaker products in retail stores before buying and building the kit.
Sorry Andy. I've agreed with you on some other posts, but not on this one.
I agree, as said in an earlier post, I use a 5 1/2" Dynavox midwoofer with a 3" VC (unusually large size in a midwoof) and it reproduces bass nice and clean down to its rated 100 Hz, and at SPLs into the 90s (although I don't usually listen much beyond 85). With a 3" coil, it can handle up to 60W continuous, 100W peak. I listen in about a 400 sq. ft. room, about 10 feet away.
Do you hear anything coming out of your speakers, or does it come from where the stereo arrangement puts them. Further, is that enhanced by the sound of the recorded spaciousness to aid location...
In any case I'd rather make the point that even if an artificial stereo soundstage is not completely accurate, the recording can still be perfectly enjoyable.
Personally I do not expect my system to sound like a live performance, which be be very good or mediocre depending on which seats you can afford to buy, but I want as good an approximation of such a performance if it was recorded as such. With so many of my recordings being studio albums all I need to hear is what the recording engineers and the musicians have decided is what they want me to hear as accurately as my budget allows.
My current "reference" diy (read: kludge) resolves deep bass drumroll and complex triangle "solo" over full orchestral climax (Karajan coupling of Dvorak bass drum concerto nee New World Symphony with Smetana triangle concerto nee Moldau). Yesterday I compared my favorite whizzer-less drum-paper 5.5" one-way 10L TLonken against Quad ERA-1 flat-panel headphones, and the powerful fullrange didn't resolve bass drum & triangle as cleanly as either the 'phones or my reference Ultrae (two-way sealed 6.5" resin-coated-carbon-fiber-cone-plast'ed subwoofer-flat-to-7.5khz and active electrostatic supertweeter, then augmented by 4x7 vintage alnico widerange). My conclusion: perhaps plast'ed or otherwise-treated one-way could do it; two-way certainly could; but three-way sounded "ultra sultry".
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What's that wonder driver?
Even if it is flat to 7.5 kHz on axis, it has to be beaming off-axis, creating a dip in the off-axis response.
The biggest one is that most designs do not adhere to the D'Appolito's rules regarding the relation between the center to center distance and the crossover point, which has to be much lower than in TM. If not done right, there are comb filtering and lobing issues because the three drivers are no longer a point source.
Having read a few forums threads on this matter, the consensus is that MTM can sound great when done in accordance with the D'Appolito's rules, and not so great when it isn't, which is the case with many MTM designs.
Described here https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/whizzer-and-intelligibility.185012/post-7154646
I haven't noticed a problem nor measured it, but the plast-rosette helps with dispersion. The electrostatic supertweeter (ESKMO EST-200 not shown) is itself bookshelf-speaker-sized and the entire baffle is waveguide. A supersize-alnico Rola 4x7 (also not shown) used as midrange sits naked on top, forming a bizarre sort of MTM with perfect vertical dispersion to my ears. (Note: top & bottom both go through 0.68mH~940hz LPF.)