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Originally Posted by Indytown
What could they change on the D4 ??
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I'm also excited at the prospect of something substantial but realistically it's unlikely to be a revolutionary shift as per the D3 series because B&W retooled the factory at significant expense back in 2015, and I do recall hearing that their engineers were already working on a D4 iteration when the D3 was released.
Most likely is an incremental change as we saw from D1 to D2, which was mostly a retuning of the enclosure and small improvements to the tweeter.
I think it's fair to say that BW is up against the limits of what's possible from their three driver / three enclosure design philosophy, which has its pros and cons. Someone mentioned time-alignment, which is one of the (arguable) limitations of the existing D3 series, but to correct it would necessitate inverting a driver polarity, which was not preferred by BW in their previous subjective evaluations. Of course it is possible that the engineers have been able to further simplify the M-T crossover to a purely first order electrical network, but this is almost always at the expense of vertical axis response above and below the point of phase coherence. Another obstacle is the position of the tweeter pod atop the FST enclose, and the risk of interference effects when the tweeter is recessed for voice coil alignment.
A potential way forward would be to alter their design philosophy and move to a single (Al) molded enclosure that housed both tweeter and FST and also included a tweeter waveguide for diffraction control plus directivity and power response etc.
Although not out of the question I think it's very unlikely that we'll see a move to some sort of active / DSP solution.