Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

@kota1 @thespeakerdude 
When anything is put in front of a speaker the wave is deflected somehow, when you put something like window louvers or a horn to guide high frequencies the wave is deflected. Many have mentioned "wave guides" and acoustic lenses focusing the sound, well I thought that was a fad 30 years ago because of course waves interact poorly when they are changed and mingled. I understand the kind of filter some speakers put over drivers that look like a grill to break up the waves in a particular way but focusing the wave is never a good thing, we called it near field reflections back when all those speakers were tossed away. Are they back? Has someone discovered how to make waves interact and keep the amplitudes in tact after the focusing? Even the grill on my own 9hs has a high tech symmetrical design to defocus the beryllium tweeters and midrange from sounding to harsh that is done on purpose to smooth (distort) the high frequency I understand that but if the acoustic lens is a guide that focuses the wave there aren't there inevitable problems.

I always think of microphones when I think of speakers, once I was doing sound for a concert with Wynton Marsalis, I was a big fan and very excited to work with him. He told me to put a Sennheiser 421(a large diaphragm dynamic mic) down stage and that's all he said his trio would play into it, they would mix themselves as they got closer and farther from the microphone. Just like Edison did on the first recordings ever. Well as you probably guessed the sound was great. The sound was so good it left an indelible impression about how important phasing was I never forgot.

Also 
Dante is simply a network protocol that is used to send sound through a network cable it great for switching, There is no sound degradation and can connect to anything through Dante Control and Dante Via. Dante is the future.

The one wave guide I have personal experience that clearly stands up and salutes is the one JBL developed for the M2. After that development they started trickling it down to their other speakers. I think it is amazing and here is Frank Filipetti breaking it down (1:15). If you check out Frank’s discography and sample his mixes the "proof" is in the result IMO:

@donavabdear ,

For you Genelec, the mid is the waveguide for the tweeter and the front is the waveguide for the mid, so we better hope things have gotten better.

Reflections, higher order modes, throat and mouth and edge diffraction, resonances, it is not as easy as it seems.

The answer is the problem still exists, but we have gotten much better at making them, not the least because we have software now (even in the DIY community) that really helps to automate and optimize aspects of the designs so instead of making a 100 revisions or more CNCing plastic, you are now making 5-10 and printing them. How many you need usually comes down to how good your model is of the underlying driver.

Our software like our competitors is a mix of proprietary software and off the shelf generic tools and plug-ins. Obviously can't post that, but I can post stuff out in the "community" that is really good. This reminded me of a interview with Earl Geddes, always as crotchety as ever, but also always interesting. I like the guy, don't get me wrong, but he is like that friend you have that is always cranky :-)

The video is rather apropos, as he mentions active and passive speakers too, though I consider some of this comments outdated. Some however, are not. The most important one is that active speaker design does not magically solve all issues. You need to start first by being a good "passive" or in essence fundamental speaker designer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhe8VfuTg08

More relevant to the discussion is his mention of what he considers, and many agree, of the importance of constant directivity to ensure a speaker sounds good in most environments. This is a implementation embodiment of the Toole\Harman research showing smooth off-axis response is important. That does not solve the waveguide issue, it just give credence to why it is important to solve it. Very relevant to the discussion is the use of software for wave guide design. Geddes says that even the DIY S/W, or at least semi open source, does a better job than he was able to do. The software and a comprehensive discussion happened here:

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/acoustic-horn-design-the-easy-way-ath4.338806/

@thespeakerdude Great, thank you for that. What is a problem is longer wave guides or horns or anything that is trying to direct the wave. Call 1k a 1 foot long wave (close enough) 2k is 6 inches 4k is 3, at this point horns and curved boxes with computer curves easily confuse the wave by bouncing them in and around whatever kind of guide the designer has made, there is no way out of that sinareo. Horns are never ok, they may sound good but the huge difference in size of waves doesn’t allow a horn to accommodate multiple frequencies properly. A traditional cone driver is simply a piston that creates the wave but doesn’t redirect it, (except for the edges and things like that) as horns do. My Genelecs use the term wave guide but it’s really wave takeoff more than anything because the size of the waves and the depth of the high frequency and mid frequency voice coil throw is so much shorter, they aren’t designed to guide the frequencies like the Tannoy and the Uri’s of the past which sounded like everything was pumped through a bullhorn, even a multi million dollar showcases theater with an 80 inch sub has got this wrong IMO. The 80 inch driver is a perfect example, what would that horn have to look like well it’s impossible to make a horn that accommodates frequencies that large between 1 and 20Hz you would need 20 huge horns. In that video they described midrange center channels that used a curve to redirect the waves to the audience, this is a big compromise in a no compromise room. A great Director of photography I worked in the movies always spoke of the light he used as "them" he would always bounce, diffuse, cut and all the other things DPs do with light by thinking of light as little particles that bounces around, so I told him use one of my sound diffusers to bounce his light it only makes sense, he was amazed he hadn’t ever seen that before. The moral of the story is if you think of the sound as particles that interact with each other you would never expect to send them down a horn and expect to not have them interact. Hope that’s a tiny bit clear.