barefootsound

My thought is if the speaker is designed to play a 116dB will it cause a shortcoming somewhere else? Why pay for performance that has no use?

No. Not needing to play that loud sustained means there is ample headroom for when you play music that has a lot of big transient swings. You're using the speaker's performance and ease of use SPL wise. 

you don't want a speaker that can only do 100dB peak. remember this metric is mostly determined at 1kHz and bass frequencies need to be 10 to 20dB louder to be perceptively heard so yeah that headroom is very important

The longer I listen the more I move away from "ruthlessly revealing" ( fatiguing) sound. When a speaker makes the focus of a song the recording defects and quality of musicianship IME it looses it’s musicality. When I start liking the song, not for the tune but  because it is well recorded or the musicians are talented something has gone wrong, YMMV.

There are other things than raw detail retrieval that aren’t relevant to mastering. Things like PRAT, colors, bloom. Why do I not care for ATC? They play loud with no compression. They are clear, accurate, and not fatiguing.  Maybe because they are so rigid they loose the musicality. Like compare Benchmark to NOS DAC and sound goes from etched, bleached out white to colors, but not coloration. If that makes any sense.

I do not subscribe to the notion of Benchmark being etched... they do not add anything to the frequency response in your room. Moving the speakers a mm does more to the sound than any DAC ever would and especially not a pretty top of the line neutral DAC that doesn't add anything and allows a song to shine as is. Maybe I have a different experience

How about yg acoustics dual coherent the crossover coherent in both time and frequency domains?

yg-acoustics DualCoherent

 

You got me thinking about single driver vs. time aligned multi driver. What do you think about

Fujitsu Ten Eclipse TD712z loudspeaker

A single 4.7" driver with a glass-fiber cone is mounted in an egg-shaped enclosure of artificial marble,

 

Which would you choose?

What is the ideal number of drivers in a loudspeaker system?
a) two
b) three
c) four or more
d) none of the above

You have your answer? Good. Next question:

What is the best type of crossover in a loudspeaker system?
a) first order (6dB/octave)
b) second order (12dB)
c) third order (18dB)
d) fourth order (24dB) or higher
e) none of the above

Single drivers imo are a gimmicky mess with their over compression that happens are the breakup mode. they narrow up too early and become pinpoint directional for treble so very tapering and thus in room will sound dark and bright at the same time. 

haven't heard that YG speaker but the ones I've heard have been pretty good sounding with good honesty and delivery of tonal balance.

Ideal number od driver depends on what implementation you wanna do.

Provided the drivers are chosen meticulously with parameters that makes marrying one to another easy, I'd say a 3 way is pretty much a great balance across board. Can help with sensitivity. But you gotta be good with your crossover slopes to mitigate transducer limits. first orders are not ideal imo. 2nd, 3rd and 4th have their uses depending on the drivers you're using and what kind of balance and control you wanna achieve

I've heard great speakers across almost all driver implementations except single drivers so that surely should be what to avoid @cdc