Old fart with speaker questions, be nice :-)

[Flea77]

Back in the day, I spent way too much time and money on car audio. One thing I learned (among many) was that you had to use the correct size speaker for a given application. For example, an 8" woofer could produce very tight bass, but was horrible at low frequencies, the 15" was fantastic a low frequencies, but muddy higher up. The 12" was a good middle ground, when strapped correctly it could produce most of the tightness of the 8" while getting most of the low freqs. Notice I said most.

Today I am looking at replacing my aging front channel speakers (L and R) so I head off to places online like Crutchfield. Almost all the speakers now use a maximum of 6.25" driver while placing all the rest of the low freqs on the sub. This seems completely absurd to me. From my aging experience you need four types of speakers, tweeter, midrange, woofer, subwoofer. It seems the industry has forgotten the difference between a woofer and subwoofer, and in fact the guy at Crutchfield told me there was no difference!

Here is an example of what I mean. I go to Frys' to listen to their home theater sound systems and the bombs are great, fantastic explosions, perfect vocals, beautiful highs, but when someone slams what appears to be a solid oak door it sounds like they slammed a trailer home door!

So tell me wise ones, am I just so old that I have no idea what today's technology can do with speakers or is everyone running around selling speakers with no bass response between what a midrange can do and what a subwoofer can do?

Right now I have a pair of really old MGA floor speakers (12" woofer, 5.25" mid, tweets) and then I have a Sony powered subwoofer. I am somewhat happy with the sound, except the MGAs are literally falling apart. I was looking to replace them with either Cerwin Vega CLS-10s or CLS-12s because I can not for the life of me believe that a skinny tower with a couple of 6.25" mids can dish it out, even if they do cost $1,200 each!

Allan