"There is still some or even a lot of reading on digital if you want to start pushing the limits / doing custom FIR filters, etc.Digital is for low end stuffs. High end and expensive stuffs are pure analog. Consider it a lesson."
That used to be true, but that particular part of the landscape may be changing. The only true weakness for digital (as long as it has all the proper inclusions of capabilities, which don't they always have) is the sound quality. That's been true of CDP's, DAC's and everything else digital...only there, sizeable advancements in sq have been made through power treatments. And digital crossovers should not be left out of that picture. Power treatments, particularly the quantum kind (which don't have all the weird side effects that component-based [caps, transformers, or other parts] power conditioning does), are beginning to change the game in favor of digital in general. It adds to the cost, but it compares extremely well to the best analog, when done sufficiently well.
"With digital actives, you just dial it up and listen for yourself...a whole lot easier and faster that way.When someone claims something is "a whole lot easy", I go like "hello, what has he done?""
I'm talking about sitting in your listening chair (with at least a mockup of the speaker design in front of you) and then going through the listening/evaluation trials of whatever drivers-vs-crossover recipes you might want to investigate...maybe make some measurements with Omni-mic to confirm some things and you should have most or all of your answers right there...the process shouldn't even take you one, whole day to test, if all goes well. You may not be able to actually measure, say, the waterfall plot of the finished design (I suppose you could if had the right test gear), but you might be amazed at just how far down the road this will take you toward a solid, finished design in one take. I tend to go through this same process several times on different days so I can average out my own moods, predilections for listening for different traits, listening awareness levels and so on, in an effort to help me take my own fallibility out of the equation. But, you get an excellent feel for things like step-loss issues, phase issues, dispersion and all the rest of it, all at once. I used this process to design a pair of open-baffle stand mounts, which are not hard to build anyway, but if you're looking to build some giant-sized box, then you would have to make a good enough mockup to listen and test with.