From the beginning I was taught that Bart Locanthi's main goal in designing a good speaker was to design an accurate speaker. And by that he meant get the frequency response as flat as possible; with the individual drivers first, then with the system. Next, look at the system's impedance curve. If you had to tweak the crossover a bit so that the system never went below 4 ohms, then do it. This was the only time a bit of linearity in frequency response could be given up.
Marantz Imperial 6 speakers The Marantz Imperial 6 was the first speaker Dawson had designed after Bart Locanthi had completed the lab/listening room set-up along with teaching his speaker design methodology to Dawson. We speaker novices would listen to the Imperial 6 all day long in between setting up other tests. It was a paper-cone 10" two-way with a phenolic ring (edge) cone tweeter. The woofer had a doped cloth surround and all cabinet parts where of ¾" veneered particleboard. In the lab the Imperial 6 measured ± 1.5 dB, 60Hz to 17,000Hz. It had a real walnut cabinet and retailed for $129.00 each. Guess what? It didn't sell worth beans.
