what's the difference between a 2 way speaker, 3 way speaker, 4 way speaker and component speaker?

 

They say that human hearing goes from 20-20kHz. 2-way, 3way, 4way, just means how many speakers. 2-ways are usually a midbass and a tweeter. 3-way would be a midbass(or small woofer), a midrange, and a tweeter. 4-way = tweeter, midrange, midbass, woofer. Each component does it's own work. Here's a couple examples:

2-way:
midbass = 60hz-3khz
tweeter = 3khz-25khz
total = 60-25khz

3-way:
woofer = 40hz-1500hz
midrange = 1500hz-4000hz
tweeter = 4khz-25khz
total = 40-25khz

This allows you to break up the frequencies to come off different speakers. One advantage to a 3-way or 4-way is you have more speakers on each channel and allows you to apply more power. Also, some crossovers will let you adjust those freqs and tweak the sound for your hearing. Component speakers separate these "components" into seperate packages as where a 2-way speaker they are one package(mounted together).

 

It's mostly a marketing ploy and bragging rights for the non-informed (as in "I just got some awesome 5-way 6x9's"). I could make up a 47-way speaker but that does not make it any better. What was said above is mostly correct in theory. However, in reality most speaker manufacturers do not provide crossovers for their speakers (other than high pass filters for protection of the tweeters). This means that at high frequencies (and sometimes even upper-mid range on multi-way speakers), multiple speakers are trying to produce the same sound. This makes for muddy sounding music. Properly installed components or high end 2-ways (with external crossovers) are usually the best. I would stay away from the other crap.

 

Agreed What i said earlier is strictly the theory of how it should work, but most companies do not use proper crossovers. My bad, I should have included that.