I have been trying to gain some understanding into 2 Way vs. 3 Way Speakers. I have read lots of information that talk about the technical difference, and that makes sense. What is hard to find is insight into the differences/advantages in the actual sound.
For those of you that have experience with both, are there notable distinctions in the sound performance between two way and three way speakers?
In my opinion, they can be almost the same, but a 2-way is really pushing that design to as far as it can go, if the goal is to have a full-range speaker system. I have this 2-way speaker https://www.genelec.com/1032c#section-technical-specifications and you can see the fairly close to on-axis crossover holes around 2 kHz in the vertical directivity plot, and the promise that harmonic distortion says below 0.5 % only, which isn’t super great. Harmonic distortion vanishes as soon as the tweeter becomes active, at least as far as I can measure it.
Anechoic response starts to fall around 40 Hz, but the rule of thumb here is that response extends about 30 % below the anechoic limit, and I dialed in some extra digital emphasis for the 20-30 Hz region, and so I managed to get something very close from 20 to 20000 Hz response out of a 2-way system. Harmonic distortion less than 1 % is considered inaudible for complex signals.