Most new speakers that I see and hear give me the impression that they were designed to part of a multispeaker HT array. If you have enough of them spread around the room and a couple of subwoofers, you could probably reproduce the same low end and room-filling soundfield that a pair AR-9s would produce, and defintely a lot more high end, since that's what most consumers prefer today. You'd probably need a bunch of equalizers to get that AR rolloff if you wanted it, though.
A pair of two-ways with 6" woofers may very well outperform the 8" woofers in AR-6s, but AR-9s? No way is a pair of two-ways with 6" woofers going to do it by themselves.