Total agreement. 6 inch woofer is simply too big for the mid range. B&W and countless other speakers never sound completely natural for this very reason. To sound natural a speaker must have wide consistent dispersion across the full frequency range.
Whenever someone says something "can’t sound natural" in high end audio, I pick up my grain-of-salt shaker and empty another grain.
This is because what is "natural" in audio has a subjective component - that is, given the vast majority of playback systems or speakers can not fully reproduce "natural" sound, and speaker designs involve compromise at any reasonable costs, it’s often a case of choosing the set of compromises, and focusing on what a speaker "does most right" to the individual’s ear. Speaker "A" with flat frequency response (or flat power response in room) may be capturing "natural" aspects than speaker "B," but speaker "B" may be producing greater dynamic life and hence be "more natural" in that regard. Then it depends on which aspect of "natural/believable" the individual listener tends to focus upon. There are for instance those who swear by Quad ESl 57s or panel speakers in general as leaving any box speaker shamed in the "natural" department, but when I listen to these panel speakers as much as I love what they do, I'm acutely aware of how they depart in believability from what dynamic speakers can provide.
Anyway...
I can’t go along with the idea that a 6 inch woofer is "simply too big" for the mid range to sound "natural." For instance, Harbeth speakers like the Monitor 30 and Super HL5 plus with their 7.8" radial drivers doing midrange duty are renowned among reviewers and listeners for their particularly natural quality. I owned the Super HL5 plus and it was stunning particularly with the human voice, in a way that few other speakers I’ve encountered could pull off.
I’ve heard other speakers with larger midrange drivers sound quite "natural" in their own way.
I think some folks start to get fixated on what they think is the "right way" to do something. This is good in a sense for speaker designers - most get fairly pig-headed about the path they’ve chosen and it helps focus energy and passion, so you get really good iterations of different speaker designs designed by different people who are sure "THIS is the right way to do speakers!" But the fact all sorts of speakers find different enthusiasts, and most of those enthusiasts finding something particularly believable about one design or another, indicates there are various ways to skin the cat. IMO.
