Question 1: Have you ever thought about having Mark Schifter build some cabinets for you? I think the LCR is a killer speaker and have been thinking about it for my Home Theater. Currently I have a rocket setup and am familiar with the quality cabinets that come out of Marks shop. This is something that is hard to give up on because I don't think I am capable of reproducing that level of quality on my own. In this article http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/Denver/denver.html It talks about Mark building cabinets and that the minimum order is 10 pairs. I hope that this comment is not out of place.
Hey... no problem. I've no issues with people bringing up other sources or designers.
Our biggest reason for not doing cabinets at this time has more to do with capital and warehouse space. It's a business decision. We are going to have at least 12-15 speaker designs when we get the entire lineup designed. If you try and inventory finished cabinets for all those designs you need a chunk of real estate, a chunk of cash and you better be 100% sure you can sell them. If your selling finished speakers people also expect multiple finish options and the kit market is much different than the finished speaker market. I suppose if I had the capital I'd offer some finished speaker options but even with unlimited capital I would do it slowly. This market is hyper competitive and it's easy to flush a couple hundred thousand dollars down the toilet. That would be a couple hundred thousand I don't have.
Question 2: Would a speaker with the Extremis 6.8 and FR125 make sense? It would seem that this arrangement would be ideal as a book shelf or perhaps a mini LCR in a MTM configuration.
The main problem with ALL full range drivers is that they are a compromise. While the FR-125s measure flat to 20K on-axis they don't put out anywhere near the high frequency content into the room as does a typical 25mm dome. Their off-axis performance is no where near as good. Even a middle of the line dome tweeter will have better performance above 5K than any full range driver. They also have more issues with energy storage as you would expect from the higher mass cones.
It wouldn't be hard to do a design as you describe. You could pretty much just leave the tweeter off any of our three way designs and you would be very close to that type of design. I think anyone who compared it to a good design with a tweeter though would find it seriously lacking in comparison and you wouldn't achieve a smaller speaker. The tweeter adds cost but in my opinion it's needed, even with the best full range drivers available (aka FR-125 among them).
