actually, anyone with half a brain could design an excellent speakers, so
no-brainer now are the superb programs which do it all for you.
You just select your woofer, decide on cabinet size, match your tweeter, and then use a xover optimizer to get the response.
Then you just tweak cabinet size, port and xover to suit your ear/room.
Speaker design in a nutshell.
To actually DESIGN drive units does take more, but even now there are programs for those.
I see what tensen is saying, speakers ARE the most individual of components, and do take a good ear and experience to get right. ( having heard awful chinese pop music, I woudln't trust their ears by and large...gross generalization
)
For that reason, I would favour those with a kind of legacy, say danish or british ones, that are established.
What puzzles me is that proac manage to get all their speakers to sound largely similar, and lo. the xovers are largley similar.
There must be more to it than that, tho', as the woofers are so different, I would've thought that would change the sound, also, I tweaked a xover myself, on some hifi world kit spx, with nice audax drive units,
and couldn't get it right, or sound that much different, at first I thought it was the xover, then the drive units that 'sets' the sound, now I don't have a bloody clue,
so maybe I don't know anything after all.( a little knowledge is a dangerous thing) I will eat humble pie,
or maybe bacon and egg tart,
or a yorkshire tart
