If tweeters are better suited to highs, small speakers to mids and large woofers to bass, why don’t we have an array of ten say ten or twenty gradually increasing speakers from tiny tweets to ENORMOUS woofers, each with a unique crossover at a specific frequency they perform best at?
We really seem to have settled on three sizes. Tweets, miss, and subs. Why is that the case?
Surely more speakers handling less varied frequencies means a better response, right?
Answer from an audio engineer here. We look at audio reproduction in octaves, and those octaves don’t translate in frequency response linearly, rather they translate logarithmically. A gradual increase in driver size and subsequent narrow frequency crossover would result in what is called comb filtering, and excessive comb filtering at that. What that means to the listener is a loss in various frequency bands at different registers that will change based on where you are listening from due to a phenomenon called phase cancellation. This results in an incomplete soundscape or sonograph.
Hope this helps.
I think this is the most interesting question I’ve ever asked and I am loving every response learning more and more.
Thanks for taking the time.