Single way or multiway

as a dealer for over 30 years our perspective our this question is simple

we have never experienced a single driver speaker worth owning the reason is simple you need a proper high frequency driver to produce clean and airy high frequencies and in the history of audio we have been moving into better and better tweeters from paper to plastics to metal domes to damped metal to ribbons and AMTs 

as long as the tweeter is well matched with a properly implemented  crossover you can create a seamless totally transparent music reproducer 

Dave and Troy

audio intellect NJ

My take is that the simpler the design the better. The intrinsic problems of single driver systems are pretty obvious. Asking a single driver to reproduce the entire spectrum is simply not possible. Having said this the midrange of the some of the best single driver speakers I have heard were spectacular. 

I am not an expert, but an extremely complex high order crossover with a great many components is precisely the direction I dont think one should go. A patently bad idea. The designers choice of drivers may necessitate such a design.

Crossovers are inherently subtractive.

I think putting this on the scale of right and wrong may not be productive. 

I encourage audiophiles to experiment on the cheap!  Madisound has a number of single "full range" drivers and kits for sale.  Rather than try to come to a definitive universal answer, build some of these kits and see how much fun they are. :) 

Every design of well,....everything is just a collection of compromises.  Something has to give in order for something else to be better.  If a design is as close to a no-compromise approach as possible, then what is given up is costs involved to make said design.

In other words, neither design is right or wrong.  Just pick which makes you happier when you listen to music.  

There are obvious advantages to be had from a point source phase coherent design. That is why increasingly horn + subwoofer solutions are being favoured by designers. The subwoofer is by design omnidirectional. Complex multi speaker designs have a hard time being phase coherent