>why is it that whenever i listen to a cone design i hear cabinet and driver colorations.
Because you listen to multi-way cone speakers in conventional cabinets which have big polar/power response problems, probably have cabinet resonances, and may have internal reflection problems.
There are not a lot of brands sold out of show rooms which get around that, their dealers are not numerous, and some of the designs are compromised to suit market tastes.
AccentSpeaker's Nola dipoles, Lyngdorf's dipole, the Gradient Revolution cardioid/dipole, and Jamo's R909 dpole use cone drivers in open baffle configurations.
B&W's flagship Nautilus has acoustically small drivers close together in damped transmission lines.
You can demo Linkwitz Orion and Gilmore's dipoles, although that's more likely to require a visit to an enthusiast's home, show, or plane trip somewhere.
The Carver Amazing and Audio Artistry line used conventional cones in dipoles but aren't around any more.
>please cite a cone system with no cabinet colorations and i will listen carefully to it when i have the chance.
Linkwitz Orion - no box, no box sound.
Linkwitz Pluto, where the mid-bass enclosure is
1. A damped transmission line with a 40dB return loss
2. Exceptionally rigid (there's an AES paper out there showing that cylindrical enclosures are as rigid as 4" concrete).
On top of the enclosure (or lack thereof) you've got the room interaction.
Technically speaking, the near field ends at the critical distance where direct sound and reverberant field are equal. With conventional speakers in a domestic environment that point is at 2-4 feet from the speaker. By the time you get a comfortable 8' out the sound you're hearing from your speakers is 6-12dB below the direct sound.
Many of your conventional speakers have a mid-range that's getting acoustically large with narrowing dispersion and the tweeters are uniformly acoustically small so they have wide dispersion. The two are relatively far apart compared to wave lengths about the cross-over region. Combine the two and you have a power response notch there. Conventional MTMs have issues for the same reason. As a tangent I think people prefer first order designs due to the shape (shallower + broader versus deeper and narrower for higher order) of the power response notch since the all-pass response introduced by fourth order filters isn't audible by itself.
When 3/4 to 15/16 of the energy you hear has a big bite taken out of its spectrum the result sounds like a speaker.
Single drivers like a big planar work around the problem with decreasing power output at high frequencies without the cross-over notch although the resulting lobes make the reflections unpredictable and placement finicky.
Dipoles like open baffle cone speakers have at least 4.8dB of directivity so things can't broaden too much at higher frequencies. The angles where cancellation is creating the biggest notch in output about the cross-over region are in a dipole null so the impact on total power response is less severe.
Speakers with acoustically small drivers close together like the Pluto avoid the problem because there isn't a large fraction of wavelength between the drivers at any angle. 4" between mid-bass and tweeter with a 1KHz cross-over is about 1/3 wave length so there shouldn't be cancellation anywhere (I haven't looked up the tweeter time alignment all-pass delay and considered it).
Coaxials can work well for the same reason. I heard a pair of the Seas coaxials in open baffles which didn't sound like speakers.
John Krevosky's NaO for Não em uma caixa "Not in a box" should work like the Orion. The Nomad Audio Ronin which is an open-baffle coaxial at high frequencies might work well too although I think you loose a lot not retaining dipolar radiation down to 40-50Hz.
I'd speculate that the GedLee and Audio Kinesis speakers mating a waveguide to a large mid-woofer matching its radiation pattern at the cross-over point would sound natural for the same reasons cone based dipoles do - more uniform power response because the driver directivity matches and the angles of greatest cancellation are in an area where response is attenuated.
