Seeking full range single driver speaker recs

Manger is not really qualified as a fullrange driver, even in the looser sense. It only responds down to 80Hz, and all the Manger speakers have a woofer, or use a separate subwoofer. If you plan to use the sub anyway, then they might be a consideration.

They are a very interesting design however, and I had some interest myself in them at one point. But the low efficiency was not suitable for my system. Quite expensive too.

Sean:

You looked @ measurments while I instead listened to the Jordan drivers in two different types of enclosures. The Jordan drivers offered an amazing amount of separation (single instruments and musical lines in complex material) which in turn made for great deal of realism.

To compare time coherence between the drivers I use and the typical, popular 2/3 way cone based speaker is like comparing apples to oranges. The single driver speakers (and even the coaxials) sound very much like decent planers, but with greater dynamic swings and a very 3D effect. My drivers are neither bright/lean nor are they lacking in bass/mid-bass while playing popular music (considering the size of the cones). The Stephens would be considered to be forward sounding by most (I enjoy this type of sound) and the Coral speakers are more middle of the road in this aspect. The Stephens 8" drivers present stronger (if not deeper) bass/mid-bass response than most of the 12" FR drivers I own or have owned, so go figure.

If you place any driver in a poorly designed cabinet (or mount it poorly in a well designed cabinet) there will be problems such as you mention (there were also problems with the early Lowther driver designs, in general, but from what I have read this has been addressed with their most recent offerings). I would not own vintage Lowthers on a bet having listened to various driver and cabinet combos over the years, but then this is but a small selection amongst a sea of FR single drivers of which to choose from.

Though I have not had any of my speakers set up properly for a while (we need to do some serious sorting/cleaning), when I did the desirable listening area covered pretty much the width of the living room with the Stephens drivers. These are a bit odd for vintage FR drivers in that their desired baffle width (in a non sealed enclosure) is approx. 11 inches. My current cab's are slightly wider than this so I do expect an even more open sound (wider/deeper presentation) when proper/narrower cab's are used.

I do agree that some of the older box/cabinet FR designs requiring a wide baffle area do seem to restrict the size (width/depth) of of the listening area, but then again the few open baffle setups I have listened to had quite the opposite effect, and the baffle area was huge. As I do not have room for large open baffle designs, I try not to dwell on this, but I suspect that open baffles with the right driver, and perhaps subs, are the way to go.

Why not pick up some FR's and experiment with them yourself?

Twl: I've not really read a lot about the Manger's other than a few bits and pieces here. I tend to be drawn to "freak" products that are technically adventurous and the requirements for high power are not a problem for me.

Dekay: I have experimented with a few FR drivers, but not as much as i'd like to. My brother was running some 8" full ranges w/ whizzers in a modified transmission line, but he never really liked the results. I don't think that he built the line right but he insists that he did. I wanted to tinker with the drivers that he had, but he ended up selling them to a mutual friend.

As a general rule, unless i can get something dirt cheap and it is something that i already have a bit of interest in, i basically try to weed things out by looking at the technical merits that specific designs / products have to offer. I realize that i may miss a few "garage built gems" along the way using this routine, but i've already got so many different projects going on that i have to use some type of "filtering" to keep things reasonable. This place already looks like Sanford & Son's Audio / RF Wrecking House, so i'm trying to be a little more selective lately : ) Sean
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Sean:

If you spend any amount of time @ thrifts/garage sales (you know the sales where the stuff actually comes from garage/basement/attic storage) you are bound to run into desirable vintage single/coaxial drivers on the cheap.

These types of drivers were very popular when I was little and growing up in the Midwest, though most of their user's were usually more interested in woodworking (building nice show piece cabinets) than fine tuning their mono/stereo systems.

An exception to this were a couple of our neighbors. One a wood craftsman that could have taught Norm a few tricks and the other an electrician for Westinghouse. Together they built great sounding/nice looking speakers and tube amps based on Klipsch, Stephens, Marantz, Williamson, other designs of the time.

These were the very first killer Hi-fi systems I heard. One of the neighbors (the woodworking guy) hosted a couple of parties a year @ which the grownups used to dance to music later on in the evening. His living room speakers looked to be Klipsch Cornerhorns done in a variety of hard woods. He cut his own trees (ran a selective one man tree service on the side:-) and/stored/aged the wood himself.

Try Creative Sound in Canada. They sell the Jordan driver and have links to DIY designs. The Tang Band W3-871s may be better and there are line arrays such as done by Jim Griffin with this little 3".
Creative Sound