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?
It’s difficult to make a single driver cover a wide range of frequencies without having issues at the extremes of its range (spurious resonances and distortion or falloff in amplitude.) In a multi-way speaker, each type of driver is optimized to reproduce a specific frequency range. A two-way speaker (woofer plus tweeter) can be designed to adequately cover the full range of frequencies from the lowest to the highest.
So why would anyone need a three-way speaker? An interesting thing happens at the crossover frequency (where both woofer and tweeter emit sound.). Being physically spaced apart and constructed of different materials, they may not blend perfectly. And this crossover is often right around where the vocal range is, so it can affect how voices sound. So having a dedicated midrange driver to handle this critical range where most of the melody occurs (leaving the woofer to handle the boom, and the tweeter to handle the sizzle) is a popular solution.
That being said, there are both good and bad examples of each type of speaker. So trust your ears