Hi Adam,
I'm not going to state this is impossible because we happen to have a 6" midrange driver that dam near has the same peak to peak excursion of some of the woofers we use. So that driver could be used in an enclosure sharing airspace with the woofers. So it's not impossible. Would the mids sound as good as a mid in it's own enclosure? Highly unlikely.
Leif,
Again, apples to oranges.
6" mid
may have the same excursion as a 6" woofer. In fact, it is not uncommon. Many 2.5 way designs use that arrangement. However, we are
not talking about woofer and a mid of same surface area. We are talking about Magico S5, where a 5" mid works with two 10" woofers. The difference in cone area is 1 to 8 (mid to woofers).
Now, what happens with the mid, in a joint volume of a sealed box, when the woofer goes down ? The mid goes up of course. If the cone area of both speakers is the same, both will travel similar distance, although in opposite directions .
Now what happens if the mid and the woofer were
different in size ? Well, if the woofer was twice as big, the mid would have to travel twice as much to compensate ! So if a 10" woofer went down by 1", the 7" mid (7" is half the surface area of 10") would have to go up twice as far to compensate, which is ~2" (I put ~2 instead of =2, as air is compressible plus there are other, although small variables).
In case of Magico, two 10" woofers have the surface area which is 8 times greater than a single 5" mid. So if the go down 1/2" (which is within their linear excursion), the mid would have to go up 8x as far to compensate, which is 4" ! That is of course - absurd. And since the mid linear excursion is closer to 2-3mm, it means the mid driver would bottom out when the woofers mooved as little as ... 0.3mm ! (that is 0.01 of an inch for those not into metric system)
Don't you see, that even at first sight, and without doing any calculations, Ack's 'theory' is a pure nonsense ?
And since you are a pro, you could verify that by looking at distortion measurements which have been discussed in this thread. If the mid was working in the same volume as the two woofers, the THD figures @ 100dB for the mid driver would sky rocket, rather than stay at less than 0.1% THD:
I think it is obvoius even for people with moderate knowledge on how speakers work, and must have been obvious for a speaker
designer.
I'm even more surprised reading that you 'enjoyed the discussion'. It means you enjoyed watching a competitor beeing bashed, even though you knew all too well, it was all BS from start to finish.