I keep looking for affordable ways to make the 3-ways active. Plenty of quality measurements have been made for an active sim, but I suspect the main advantage the commercial version of this speaker, the Swan M3A has is FIR filtering and EQ. It's a well enough designed speaker that I'm sure nothing is being put to it's limit, but it would be expensive to make it passive and ironing board flat. These are also surprisingly low distortion parts, when put together as they are. I wouldn't be surprised if the distortion was often amplifier limited vs high SPL compression.
To be clear, I'm still very satisfied with my purchase, but they're cheap enough and good enough that I can really see the potential in these kits. If consumers can get a kit for as low as $200, think about how cheap these must be to make. And they're frankly better than a lot of hi-fi out there as-is, maybe with some tone knob adjustments to the treble, but y'know. Wrap 'em in mahogany and aluminum, put a snazzy plate amp on the back, charge $1000+ for them, instant success.
But I'm not a speaker manufacturer and I sure don't have an anechoic chamber. Besides that, I'm still figuring in my head what kind of electronics I can stick on these without going over the value of the speakers themselves. Considering these need a subwoofer for home theater duty, you can't get away with less than a
MiniDSP 2x8 kit, which is like ~300USD, without even touching the amps. I'd be tempted to try a
raspberry pi DSP solution, since the outboard kits only cost up to $75 when they're available, but that's a major headache. Another option would be to use the passive crossover between the midrange and tweeter, stripping the hi-pass filter off of the midrange and using EQ/FIR to correct them on a single channel. This could have a lot of problems, really. And what's worse is you can't run a digital output to a subwoofer from any of the 2x4 miniDSP kits.
Has anyone done measurements on the Dayton DSP systems? I suspect they won't be good, but I want to be surprised.