Single driver speakers. Are they worth considering ?

Single drivers are great....
....70+ years ago.

Things have changed quite awhile ago....it's harder to pull off the 'hat trick' to make things blend properly, but....

'One trick pony's' still only do one trick.

Zu make full range single driver speakers.
I have a pair of the Soul Superflys and they sound really good to me. They can be a bit finicky to set up properly as mentioned above but that’s part of the fun, right?

Their high efficiency means a lot of low powered tube amps become a viable option to audition.Zu also suggests some SS amps that pair well with their speakers.


A Miniwatt N3 for example, has more than enough power to make the Zu's sing and go to ear-splitting sound levels. Pretty much any vintage receiver works great too.

Looking at an article form Sublime Acoustic they noted that "the capacitor and inductor values drift with temperature. When you turn up the volume the values will begin to drift, which causes the effective crossover frequency and other characteristics to drift, which  can lead to distortion of the sound."
Before purchasing my speakers, I probably spent 6 months reading about speaker performance and concluded that if all possible it would profit me to eliminate crossovers as much as it is possible to do so. 

This is another coaxial speaker; there is an add on tweeter ("super-tweeter" per Zu). The main driver functions to slightly above 10KHz.

No crossover (though filters). Still not a true full range single driver speaker.

Zu make full range single driver speakers.

With one driver we do not have any phase, timing and tonal discrepancy issues that plague multi-driver systems. There are no obscured bands in the midrange, hence there is a possibility to integrate the most sensitive midrange better to the room acoustics. When the integration to room acoustics is perfect, the jump is significant. With a well integrated multi-driver system the improvement is not as drastic, as the midrange is still plagued by issues from the multi-driver solution. The question is: do we want pure midrange (single driver) or extended extremes (multi driver)? Given that over 90% of our brain's sound processing power is in the midrange, we benefit most from improved midrange. We have a culture that obsesses with extremes, so most people go for that automatically. It's ultimately a personal choice. Just an observation: my friends who settled on a single driver solution have stuck to it, and rave about the music they are playing, and have no thought about speaker upgrades.... single driver sound has a rightness to it that multi driver cannot match. If you look for "submarine crashing to the iceberg" then they are not the right choice.