Hi JLM,
Many thanks for your post - a very reasonable question. Andy is right, however.
I began my business in 1997 as a crusade against high prices and cynical design practices. My rural background in remote South Australia compelled me to create the best quality at the lowest price - an obsession with the value equation. As time passed and I came to understand the market better and just how businesses were run, I realised that my altruism had to give way to realism, and my prices slowly rose. No faster than high end prices rose, however, but I still believe that simplicity and elegance is best in the value equation.
I generally prefer two way speakers, largely because the phase shift at both ends of a passband filter is significantly more damaging to the music than the much simpler high and low pass filters used in the two way. Advances in driver technology in the last decade have seen large drivers extended to easily 3KHz, and tweeters taken down to 1500Hz with relative ease. When you factor in that most passive LP/HP filters have insertion losses of less than half a dB, that there is added complexity in line level crossovers with their multiple ICs and power supply considerations, and that multiamp setups incur high cost, you ask yourself why it should be done this way. Only the Orion/Phoenix comes close to the ideal in terms of sonic performance, but in fact if you use bipole design in a conventional speaker you should be able to derive most of the benefits. I guess I'm just not fully comfortable with the value equation of multiway systems, though I can see a marginal theoretical improvement, based as it is on idealogical engineering notions.
Nonetheless, the day could be coming when I recognise that despite the added cost, the marginal improvement is worth it. For myself, I would not build an Orion because I'm more than happy with my own passive crossover speakers. But others do build such systems, locally Andy and Mark have one each, I respect their journeys enormously, and for them it is clearly worth it. I might soon feel this way too, but I'd start with only a two way system, a la NaO - though not yet.
As time passes and I learn more my designs are becoming more sophisticated and slowly evolving from their extreme simplicity. I can see a day when I will build a multiway system, and any Aspen customers who buys multiple AKSA/Lifeforce modules presently enjoys a substantial discount to allay the higher cost.
Does this answer your question, JLM? I'm moving this way, but am presently trying to develop other products of a power supply and switching nature to fill what I think is a more immediate need. The active market is actually very small - it represents the pinnacle of audiophilia, but I'm just not quite there yet!
Cheers,
Hugh
