The LS9s are crossing over at 600?.....so a suckout at 200 is probably? something to do with the design/room interaction...whatever. Who knows about the Serenity. All three of those speakers are quite different. The planar/hybrid speakers you mention all have the mid/tweets in front of the woofer time wise. I am not talking about sharing the same baffle...I am talking setting the mid/tweets back to align physically with the woofs. If you are just guessing and generalizing based on listening to rooms at a show.....well, then it is just a guess. There are many hybrids out there with many different kinds of sounds....at all frequencies. Every design needs to be looked at on its own and tweaked for the best sound possible. Getting that 200hz right is hard with any multiway speaker....and the difference in phase and speed, etc. between planars and slower drivers is always a tricky thing. However, many hybrids do sound wonderful. At least with the Serenities and my speakers you have dipole bass and dipole mid/highs. As you know a box bass explodes its sound in all directions....whereas dipole bass follows what mids and highs do.....but they still need to be time and phase aligned. Think about how many state of the art box speakers have their mids set back from the woofers. Those manufactures don't do this for nothing (way harder to manufactuer and implement). They listened and realized it sounds better. However, an equal number of all out speakers do not set back the midranges from the woofers.......OMG is there no one right way?!? Not that I know of.
Mike Lavigne
http://cgi.audioasylum.com/systems/663.html has the super expensive Evolution Acoustics speakers that have the additional bass towers. He said that getting the relationship between the main towers and bass towers just in the exact position and the tilt of the bass towers to his listening position was the difference between really good sound and OMG (he said he moved the main towers back about one inch and then tilted the bass tower very slightly). His bass towers cross over at something like 40-50hz. This game is crazy with so many possible answers to things. I like to take the largest view possible (mostly that I don't know much and that I have to experiment directly to have any idea what is real......and then it might only be real in that one circumstance and in that one system). "Truth" in audio is hard to nail down. The room interactions, especially below 400hz are crazy! This is why I am a SUPER big fan of bi-amping and equalizing the bass. No room is perfect. If you equalize the bass at listening position you get some pretty clean bass sounds.....of course, there are tons of other things that control bass response as well. Also, with bi-amping then the mids and highs do not have to see all the back EMF from the woofers and can be driven much more easily......its just plain cleaner sounding to bi-amp. Never heard anyone say anything otherwise.
I will be demoing my speakers in the bay area in peoples homes. This way they can compare directly to their megabuck speakers in their own room using their own equipment (if the results are good, I am sure you will see tons of posts all over the internet...including here). My plan is to mostly sell kits. Very dead baffles, bracing and bases can be made by anyone, anywhere. Open baffle speakers are simple....no box engineering needed.
