I realize this thread has blown up and somewhat derailed, and I hadn't seen a couple of things to note about directly comparing a STICK vs. Conventional speakers.
A. There are different types of sticks and not all are the same. Most Stick PA systems cannot and do not outperform conventional 2 way speakers. I will outline that in a bit.
B. Deployment needs should determine what speaker option to use. While 120* wide speakers seem like a great choice, often a 60* wide option can be a better choice and the later is often only a conventional offering.
C. Sightlines and deployment option..... It is pretty easy to see that a conventional speaker will have more options for deployment.
So what about point A? Many like to think that if you have 6 X 4" speakers in a line that you will beat out a 12" and have better coverage control. Not always so. A 4" speaker has a radiating area of only 12.56". If you have 6 of these you would have a total area of 75.36". A 12" speaker has 113.09" of radiating area all by itself. Ok so the 12" speaker has almost 1/3rd more radiating area, but what about directional control? There is no doubt that 6 speakers will have more directional control in one plane, but how much is it really? Not much. The length of the array must be 4X the length of the lowest frequency of interest to have true directional control. 6 X 4" speakers placed directly next to each other will have a line length of only 24". A line length this long can only have true directional control over frequencies above about 2khz. That's not very useful at all now, is it..... Even if you space the speakers out a little bit you don't really gain much directional control to any better standard. Where it can help is that you do gain control of frequencies to a lower frequency than a standard horn may though.
A column speaker ( or stick if you prefer ) can be made in different ways and some have 4 X 6" speakers in them. This would have a total radiating area of 153.92". This is more than a typical 12" conventional speaker has and the performance of this type of speaker starts to begin to surpass that of a conventional. The only caveat to that is that a 6" speaker tends to have less X-Max and cone movement ability to that of contemporary 12" models. So again, even though the radiating area is now surpassed, the ability to move a total volume of air is still relatively low. The length of a line of 6" speakers in typical options is still not long enough to really have useful directional control to merit boasting about.
The long and short of it is that you can spend a lot of money on a column/Stick speaker and not gain ANY usable performance over a conventional 12" 2-way design. Where the column/stick speakers tend to win out is that the horn portion of them is higher up and because there are multiple drivers they can steer the beam a little bit making it work better for front to back coverage. Often the coverage of column speakers is wide though which to me is a limiting factor. It is not always advisable to have wide coverage speaker in highly reverberant spaces where every wall is a reflector of energy. In this case, a conventional speaker with a 60* X 40* horn can prevail. Also if you truly need output beyond 130db of peak SPL, you will have to revert back to conventional designs in most cases. Cost is typically the largest consideration. A column speaker is generally more expensive given its performance characteristics. So most are suited for quieter audiences and environments where SPL is kept low and for open spaces where you need wide coverage. The directional control you do have can be best utilized in this scenario and I feel they are best suited for use in mono where you simply want all the sound to eminate from one place and cover the desired space.
