2-way design vs. 3-way design means ?

Sound advice from jrareform. I’m old enough to have owned and sold all the driver perturbations. It’s not intuitive. For example my flagship model Voxativ single driver speakers were faster and more precise than Zu flagship 3 way model (with built in separate bass unit — so maybe 4 way). Audition them as best you can.

I thought it had to do with crossover design. ie  The crossover is cut into three sections and therefore you can feed the three individualized signals to as many drivers you want. This is a three-way I guess

To say how many drivers a speaker has doesn’t necessarily mean whether it’s a two-way three-way or four-way.

@OP the term 'way' refers to how the frequency range is split. For the most part this will equate to the number of drivers used in the design. In a classic three way speaker, the drivers will cover the bass, midrange and treble. In a two way, the drivers will cover the bass and midrange - one driver, and the treble - the second driver. However, there are variations. For example, some of the classic BBC designs were three ways where the frequency range involved the use of a midbass unit, tweeter and supertweeter. However - this still involved three drive units.

And then there was the Bose 901. No way. 

Up until recently, the best overall loudspeaker I have owned were a pair of Eclipse TD712z Mk Is. They use one very special driver in a very special enclosure. No crossover. Direct connection to the music. They are surprisingly good at moderate levels and lack only a small amount of high treble and deep bass. The imaging and soundstage are amazingly accurate—sometimes too much so. I owned five-way, four-way, three-way, and two-way speakers that only did one thing better than the TD712s. But my latest speaker is a three-way with four drivers. It is a very, very good three-way, the TAD Evolution One. It is better than any speaker I have owned and on par with many other configurations of loudspeaker.

My conclusion: The number of drivers and crossover design is less important than their execution in the speaker.