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The Seas Neo is usable for sure, but just not exciting. In that price category I personally would be trying the Evil tweets next.

As for your statement that I always ask about drivers, indeed a good preference is helpful in narrowing things down but you are on a budget, doing a three way, and surely have goals that seem well thought out. As always the install (including tuning) is more important than the driver choice so as long as they have the capability to blend together you are fine. So yes, personally I would spend your money first on the mid, second on the beefiest XBL midbass you can get and then forego spending much on the tweeter.

I really just wanted you to compare the low frequency roll off of what you could achieve with the 4 vs the 3. That is all you can possibly gain and normally the small dash pod squashes it. If you can gain, then by all means but if not then I wanted you to draw the conclusion that works best in your car. Figure I could have just answered but thought that helping you think about it would be helpful. The FF85 is a great little driver. I run the TB W4-1337 as my near field setup at my desk for nearly the same reason. The W4 though requires a ridiculous passive crossover to tame it full range however (IIRC the crossovers were around $250 in passive components alone). Anything off axis and they would still need a tweeter. The other aspect of the 4" driver is the trade off of higher frequency. I know you see that people blow the little ND's, but IMO that is solely due to complete lack of experience. They can take plenty, but when you are looking at a driver that is only playing 6k+ you shouldn't expect that it makes your ears bleed and of course the beauty of the 3 way is that you can control that. Do realize that most people want loud setups. In fact in any blind testing with almost any quality of product the louder one is chosen. Exactly why blind testing is so hard. Obviously drivers that are horribly different in FR can toss the statement out the window. The second sad fact is that most people don't find loud clean setups to sound loud. In other words most people on any audio forum would want to drive their poor tweeter into oblivion so it sounds good to them. This is how you blow a tweeter. Outside of that the other largest reason for blowing a tweeter is not being diligent in checking your crossover settings before turning them up. How you tune has an effect on this as well. You should tune the mids first and get them to do everything you want. Then add the tweets only for filling in what the mids cannot. Expect it to take 30+ hours of listening and adjusting to really dial it in and then you are in the right mindset.

If he didn't get his answer five years ago, I don't think he needs it now. Please check dates before posting.

At this point I am switching to the large format tweeter. I already bought the HDS. I will probably pick up at least on more large format to to play back to back, before building the pods. Anyone reading this considering the Neo Seas, I will say I had no major complaints. Although they were nothing to write home about imo. Very sterile would be the best way I could describe them. Old man tweeters perhaps. As far as metal dome tweeters, The few I've heard did sound very detailed to me. Possibly something I will play with some more down the road. Lastly I got my SSA Evil tweets in the mail yesterday, that I purchased for another vehicle I will be doing a build on soon. I will be putting them in my current pods today and giving them a listen for the time being!

Thanks for the offer, i will keep it in mind moving forward. I'm planning on making some mounting rings for the large formats and see if I can stomach the shape of the pods will end up. That may persuade me away from large formats. Sean has been a very valuable asset to my last couple biulds. Could not ask for a better audio mentor!