>If a manufacturer were designing a new loudspeaker at a $5K or $10K price point, would there be a bias in favor of domes, in order to stick with a known, familiar entity, or a bias away from domes, in order to create interest and set oneself apart from the competition?
Depends on size. On narrower speakers domes (or inverted domes) mated to acoustically small midrange drivers can have uniform power + polar response (horizontal and vertical). Coaxial arrangements work well too.
I haven't heard a ribbon mated to a single mid-range driver that sounded natural presumably because the wide horizontal response and narrowing vertical window don't match up well to cone drivers.
The Raal Requisite Eternity had good integration, presumably because the vertical mid-array had polar response which should have been like the tweeter and woofers.
The right spacing in an MTM array might work too.
For larger speakers, a compression driver on a wave guide mated to a large (10-15") mid-range crossed where the -6dB angles match seems most interesting ticket since you're getting uniform controlled dispersion for less room interaction. 95-100dB/2.83V/1 meter sensitivity will yield crushing dynamics.
