Thanks for the link, it was a useful discussion. If people think this diversion - and it is a real diversion - is annoying or too off-topic, please let me know and I'll end this thread...
I don't want to beat a dead horse too much, especially when I'm not an acoustics engineer. I guess the point I made about smaller towers comes from a more fundamental question, looking for the basic reasons why modern tower speakers seem to me to be taller and thinner (and heavier) on average than they were even 10 years ago. I guess I'm looking for some insight into how and why speaker cabinet design philosophy has changed over the last 20 years.
Looking at this within the Axiom line-up, it is interesting to compare the m2/m22/m60/m80 series. By most accounts they all have similar tonal balance in the midrange and higher frequencies, all using different cabinet sizes and driver combinations, though they all share the same "anti-standing wave" tapered cabinet design. Ignoring the issue of low-frequency output, the larger ones simply play louder than the smaller ones. This no doubt was accomplished by simultaneous manipulation of the interior cabinet design, driver configuration, crossover frequency, etc.
Is it then possible to scale down the m60 (or scale up the m22) to the size of the m40 or a bit smaller, and maintain a similar tonal balance? Put another way, by manipulating various things (internal cabinet geometry, driver configuration, crossovers), can you arrive at a similar tonal balance with an arbitrary cabinet size, or do only certain discrete sizes work?
A totally inappropriate analogy is the behaviour of electrons in an atom, where they can only occupy certain defined orbitals, and nothing in between...yeah, this really rambled off-topic.
