Single driver vs traditional 3 way loudspeakers

But when you consider AER/Vox/Festrex all 3 big WBer labs employ whizzers.
They must have tested with and w/o whizzers.
To me its not important whizzer or no whizzer, only the acutal sound matters to me.
Still waiting for your imput as to the TB 2145's beaming effect.
I could swear I heard soemthing of that affect in my 2 day testing. .
So if the 2145 does present some beaming,

You've not mentioned PHY, who has been making 'full range' drivers for a very long time. None of them use whizzer cones. They are not any more or less beamy than drivers with whizzer cones and phase plugs. But you could make the argument they sound smoother. That is because breakups cause speakers to have a harsher sound, and whizzer cones can break up and introduce harshness.


The best HF response from the PHY drivers is probably their 6" unit.

Well I may have ead something in the descript about the odd spiked phase plug as helping eleiminate some beaming effect.

It doesn't. It allows you to hear highs that you would not otherwise.


That is why any 'full range' driver is nicely supplemented by a tweeter, which might operate at only 10KHz and above. I've had them work nicely by having the tweeters firing to the rear so that if you are a bit off-axis, the tonal balance is still correct. When on-axis, if the speaker is far enough from the rear wall, the rear-firing tweeters will help the speaker play a more distinct image.

has that spiked center phase pulg which eliminates beaming.

This conclusion is false. What the phase plug does is prevent cancellation from one side of the cone to the other, so the highs generated can actually be heard. It does not prevent beaming at all; that is simply a thing if you have 'full range' drivers without a tweeter.

I’ve listened to several full range driver speakers and all have compromises. Either they are soft, or lack bass, or have whizzer cone artifacts. The Cube Audio Nenuphar look interesting with a 10" woofer and 3 whizzers.

PHY has introduced a 6" driver that has no whizzer cone and yet is extended and smooth at high frequencies. Its hard to get it to go below about 60-70 Hz, but at that point you can use a sub with it quite successfully. I recommend keeping the deep bass out of that driver- to make the highs right it has a very lightweight voice coil that simply does not handle a lot of power. But it is 96dB at 1 watt, so you don’t need a lot of power to make it work in most rooms.