totally agree - and I've strived to make my setup gradually better through incremental changes toward proven logical solutions and not going on the cheap - where I was headed with my comment (poorly articulated) is that I hear so many comments on how great Katana is as an FR solution, it gets me real curious to know where the differences are specifically compared to say FR via a Matrix into 2 F12-X200s in Celestion spec enclosures. Though logically, I know the latter should be much better with a quality modeller for the reasons you point to, however, there's very little in concrete well explained data out there (I can find anyway) to explain the differences in a concrete way - but no shortage of "wow, the Katana, Headrush ... sounds so awesome". I really think the companies providing those more expensive FR targetted solutions (whether amp and/or speaker...) could do a much better job explaining why / how / by how much, and in which scenarios (more Graphs needed - like Fractal does!).
It's kinda like the F12-X200 Celestion spec cab debate - no shortage of "throw it any old cab and it'll work as FR" comments, which makes limited sense to me, but, I start buying into it in the absence of some hard core test data showing how the spec cab will work where non-spec cabs will not, and any ground in between.
Interesting stuff.
Some background: I started with running a small FOH system for a church choir at about the same time I picked up an acoustic guitar, then moved up to running FOH for various bands, sometimes in a dedicated space, sometimes in wherever they were booked inside and out, then to helping run sound at small festivals, while selling high-end audio systems, then selling custom mixing boards, all while also playing electric guitar in bands, and occasionally playing in studios, so I kinda got hit from all sides by the technologies. Plus I'm a nerd about technical stuff in general, though mostly now I prefer to make a loud noise with my guitars, amps, or modelers.
The higher-end equipment manufacturers are targeting a different audience than the low-end. The typical customer for the higher-end gear already understands how the cabinet's attributes, i.e. design, construction, size, shape, and materials, need to work with a certain sized speaker or speakers to help the combination of the cabinet and speaker sound their best, so they leave out a lot of that information because it'd be redundant to repeat what is in the acoustic and physics books.
Yeah, I see that it's harder to find the information from the manufacturer, but we can get it from various recording and FOH-oriented sites, or we can tug on the shirt of our FOH or recording engineer friends and buy them a beer and ask them questions about it. A dear friend of mine has had a long career designing and building studios and worked in very well-known studios helping record big artists so I'll ping him with questions occasionally, he'll do a brain dump and point me at various articles.
I think it's fascinating stuff but some people are intimidated by the technical side of it and "just want to plaaaaaay!"
The low-end manufacturers rely on their PR machine to spew glittering words and charts that really don't tell us anything because they don't want that information out there, basically… in my opinion. And, they throw money at magazines and stores to sell their gear, and they target those who might want to know but don't necessarily want to spend money, or time, to learn why there are these layers to the equipment and technologies. There's nothing wrong with wanting to play only, but having some knowledge about how it works helps immeasurably when picking gear.
I imagine everyone has spent too much time buying the next great thing that was advertised as being the perfect solution to problem X, found out it didn't help, ended up buying something else, and probably sold the previous thing. Whoever personifies wisdom in our lives would probably want us to learn that buying and trying then selling things doesn't help us unless we've learned how to use it
in depth before deciding it won't do what we want and trying something else, but that'd run counter to the PR machine and the desires of the manufacturers of the gizmos to separate us from our money.
Hopefully, we learn that the cycle is both an endless loop and a dead end. You said:
I've strived to make my setup gradually better through incremental changes toward proven logical solutions and not going on the cheap…
Dude, I'm on my feet clapping.
