I thought I would make some design/technical comments here too.
The drivers on the Wharfedale are both of pretty poor quality. The Kevlar is not nearly as rigid as it should be, and the voice coil and magnet are quite lightweight. The tweeter is a complete joke; it is about the cheapest neodymium I've seen, and neodymium's are usually pretty darn cheap as it is. This definitely accounts for the lack of high-end extension and detail. I swapped the tweeter out for the Yorkville's (much better, though still not great) one and the tonality changed completely, for the better.
The port is a joke; it's just a cardboard tube and I don't even think it's tuned very well. Bass extension improves a little just by sticking the inside of paper towel rolls inside there a couple more inches. There is no flaring on the port, making for some pretty intense chuff at louder volumes. There is a fibre mesh at the inside end of the port to keep you from stuffing things inside and to make it look "black" inside... this causes some turbulance, and bass chuff actually improves a fair bit if you cut this mesh off.
The cabinet is too small (not enough bass extension) and not braced at all (looser bass).
I also took a look at the amplifiers... they are very basic but decent IC amps with a sufficient power transformer. Unfortunately there are no power regulators at all, likely decreasing the performance of the IC's.
TL072's are used as opamps which suck pretty badly. I swapped these for OPA2134's but the benefit was neglible; I think the speaker would need to be better as a whole in order to get the benefit from these better parts.
DC filtering is done through some cheap polarized electrolytics, which usually tends to put a veil on the high-end. I haven't swapped these out for better ones yet because I don't have any and it's probably not worth it on these speakers anyway.
OK, I think I'm done. Let me know if there are any more questions.
In the end though all of those companies really are seperate entities that do however on occasion pool some resources. Crown and JBL have been designing stuff to go together for quite some time now. DBX offers direct midi compatibility with both ALlen Heath and with Soundcraft. It is natural for them to have some ties given their networks, but design, I am sure, is still left up to each individual company
