Actually, with its 6.5" drivers, the M50 can be thought of as a floor standing M3 albeit with double the bigger drivers.
The M22s have two 5.25" drivers...
TAM
TAM & EastCoast -- This actually hits on a related question that I have had. The M3's cross over at 2.2kHz, and the 6.5 inch woofer is therefore obviously capable of playing up in this range. It is the same woofer on the M80, which crosses over at 160 Hz and 2.3 kHz. However, there is potentially more than one way to interpret this. Surely, it means that the 5.25" midranges on the m80 have a high pass filter that is limiting their output below 160 Hz. However, the converse, i.e. that there is a low-pass filter limiting the role of the 6.5" woofers above 160 Hz is not necessarily implied. In fact, we know that in other applications, they play for almost four full octaves above this threshold.
So, my curiosity is: Do the 6.5" drivers on the m80 have a role above 160 Hz? Very naively, it seem that they work in a fairly narrow window if not, much of which is potentially overlapping with a subwoofer. Again, it's a very naive comment though, as I have no practical experience with speaker design. It could be that letting the 6.5s work together with the 5.25s much above 160 Hz would artificially boost that part of the spectrum, or have impacts on impedance, or etc. I know that Alan historically, when asked similar questions would emphasize that a crossover is a gradual gradation of 6 or 12 or 18 dB per octave, not a hard cutoff, and that this effectively widens the range in which each driver plays. Maybe that's all there is to it. But, I am curious whether the 6.5s in the m80s might really be doing more than it appears at first glance, i.e. contributing well into the midbass. I don't guess that it's the sort of question that could be definitively answered by anyone on the outside, unless they were already privy to the information by another means.
