Design a $60,000 Speaker - Start here

Ralph
I think the implications of an aerodynamically designed speaker is foreign to most. A major goal of a good driver must be to deal with the back waves of sound. Having them bounce off the basket and back through the paper thin cone is just not acceptable. The designer should make every effort to allow those waves to easily pass all the driver components to reach the dampening material of the cabinet or the cabinet walls. 
I know of two companies that do this. Vivid Speakers and Wilson Benesch. Wilson Benesch Uses a wind tunnel test on their drivers and computer models to make sure they maximize the flow of air. I think this is real advancement in speaker design. 

Jim

Monitor Audio seems to have done a lot of work to make this happen more easily in cost effective fashion.

Accuton has completely transformed the definition of motor and coil in their latest mid-woofer drivers. The first driver I posted about has very limited basket at all, and this one, has essentially no basket at all:

https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/woofers/accuton-c168-6-990-7-ceramic-cone-mid/bass/

Best,

E

Here is what Wilson Beseech is doing. 

http://wilson-benesch.com/products/endeavour-stand-mounted-loudspeaker.html

They are using two drivers in clam shell configuration. The driver that projects music/sound into the room is not facing the listener but rather the speaker. The website shows the woofer but the midrange also incorporates the same technology not the clam shell. This is what real engineering looks like, not just shiny drivers or driver coated with zircons.  

The views I represented above are really my view, and may not represent those of the masses. 

Re Wilson Benesch:

This is a 2.5 way speaker system, with an isobaric woofer.  Moderately interesting.

The woofer has 2x the motor strength, and the configuration minimizes asymmetry.  The 2.5 way helps eliminate baffle step issues, and improves sensitivity. The 0.5 way indicates the mid has no low pass filter, and the woofers add additional bass.

As for "real engineering" well, OK then. I think it's creative, and drivers sure look pretty. I have never heard a pair.

I discount ANY literature that claims small drivers are the way to get deep, low distortion bass however, but still, a 2.5 way with 7" drivers is probably pretty well balanced.

Best,

E

In smaller European rooms, the room lift will help out with the bottom end.

In bigger north American rooms, not as much, as averages go.

Most speakers need to be ’interviewed’ with room size and position as part of the analysis. Both a useless obvious statement -- and needing to be said.

All that said, a pair of 7’s (per side) will work wonders in most mid sized rooms. Extreme low bass that is as full range as it can possibly ever be tends to require perfected rooms be built or found, as well as the same applied to the speaker.. Which most can’t or won’t do. At any level of expense or income.

Few understand that bass control in a room is actually the most potent and difficult part of acoustics to fix and tame at the same time it is the least understood and most badly attended to by experts or the layman. None of our acoustical standards even have the guts to pay attention to bass, it’s all magic and mystery down there, according to those ’standards’. (weighting standards for measurement, etc). They ignore that which they can’t make sense of or understand. Bass reflex as a realized system that is in heavy use illustrates this point quite well. (Exhibit A kinda thing)

(the most informed and capable person I know of in room acoustics, by far.. is my Biz partner Taras, the approx 60 film set acoustics systems under his belt, is the least of his resume)(lots of things I’m not allowed to mention or talk about)

Giant extreme bass is like a rock hard suspended track day car. Fun for those few times it can be entertained as conjoined to the given musical source/package. Look how extreme I am! For regular life... the other +90% of the time...not entirely like tits on a boar and a hindrance, but warming up to it...