A well-designed three-way monitor using high quality drive units exhibits really outstanding performance: It plays louder. A midrange driver is typically four to five inches in diameter, meaning that the midrange driver can “move a lot more air” through the mid frequencies than a diminutive 1” tweeter. For the same wattage input, a five-inch midrange driver literally takes a “bigger bite” out of the air, which translates into more sound for the same input power.

It handles great amounts of power and is extremely reliable. Having a dedicated midrange driver means that the tweeter—which is the most fragile of speaker elements—does not have to struggle trying to reach down to the midrange frequencies, as tweeters must do in two-way systems. The crossover frequency specs tell the story: In a properly designed three-way speaker, the tweeter doesn’t have to “enter the game” until around 4,000 Hz—well up into the treble region, which is not a frequency area that requires the current-heavy drive signals that can burn out a delicate tweeter. In contrast, the tweeter in a two-way speaker crosses over about a full octave lower—around 2,000 Hz—which puts it in considerably greater thermal and mechanical danger. The lower a tweeter crosses over, the more likely it is that you’ll suffer tweeter failure from burnout or irreparable voice coil displacement from over-excursion.
The sound coverage (sometimes called “dispersion” or “radiation pattern”) is extremely wide and consistent. This is critically important in a studio monitor—you have to have wide, even, consistent sound coverage so you can hear your mixes with clarity and detail, even if you’re standing a little off to the side (“off axis”) of the speaker. The M3-6 uses its drivers only in the frequency range where it has very wide-angle dispersion. Best of all, the space-saving M3-6 Studio Reference Monitor delivers its truly spectacular three-way sound from the same compact cabinet size as a standard two-way monitor.