Headphone drivers are single, full range and stunningly good. I'm just waiting for any of the manufacturers to scale up their size to suit floor stander cabinets. Right now, IMO, voxativ and their Ilk are pretty good but, yeah, when the orchestra gets going ...I yearn for more separation
I completely agree with you but for slightly different reasons. That's why I'm not convinced that you'll ever get the floorstanding speakers you yearn for. First, I do think there is significant transmission loss in sound quality once you pass a Chord DAC signal to additional electronics. Sadly, or fortunately, when we are enjoying the music, sometimes we just don't pay attention to these differences. I had the Mojo & DAVE for over a year and while I can tell the difference between the two, I used to think the difference is not dramatic but the more I understand the differences and knew what to listen for, I eventually become much more sensitive to the differences. That is not to say that I don't love listening to Mojo in isolation. It's just that in an A/B test, I can pick up the differences a lot better.
But the real challenge for a speaker system is that as you said, it's difficult to get full-range. I don't think a single driver full-range speaker with a neutral frequency response will exist in our lifetime (with enough excursion and dynamic range and without significant distortion). As a result, we are always going to deal with analog crossovers which would also add to the loss of transparency.
However, I think the reality is that it is extremely difficult to get a room setup where we get a neutral frequency response without bass peaks. As a result, you're either going to have to accept some sort of DSP to tune out the uneven bass which adds more loss or you're going to have to accept a suboptimal frequency response in the bass region which also would be inferior to headphones.
My take is that headphones listening vs loudspeaker listening is about a different set of compromises (transparency vs soundstage) and one can argue that's true for most of our audiophilia (e.g. cost vs quality, portability vs sound quality). I think it comes down to the compromises we are willing to accept. And truth be told, the less we know, the less we can hear, sometimes the happier we can be. For me, once I have optimized the tuning of my system, once the music starts, I just try to enjoy the music and not think too hard about these compromises.
