In my case, it ended up as a 3-way, but with a 12" midrange.
The reason I went with a larger driver for the midrange was an attempt to match the radiation pattern of the horn. A larger driver starts to beam a little, which yields a better polar match to a larger horn tweeter. A larger, high efficiency driver, also tends to play midrange with lower distortion, and basically limitless dynamics.
Hello,
I am in complete agreement.
I have done the math and the measurements.
In my current configuration I have a 10 inch JBL2123H for a midrange crossed over to the M2 dual diaphragm Compression Driver and M2 waveguide. At 1600Hz the dispersion angle matches for the tweeter and midrange match right at ~120 degrees.
The current woofer is a custom recone:
JBL 2226 frame
JBL 2235 cone
JBL 2245H Voice coil (if memory serves me)
This woofer is in a ~2 cubic foot enclosure (no port disturbance)
For prototyping each driver is in a separate enclosure to facilitate swapping out individual pieces.
This is tri-amped with used Crown amplifiers recycled from a movie theater somewhere.
Rane AC23S active crossover
With a 31 band 1/3 octave equalizer, if you start with reasonably flat FR drivers the overall in room frequency response is fairly smooth with that target 1dB per octave slope.
I do this stuff for fun and to learn stuff. In terms of money for test equipment and parts I would be better off purchasing a pair of M2’s.
amirm thanks for testing real world size speakers, they are much more fun than the stand mount things that you can tuck under your arm and walk up stairs with.
Thanks DT