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Originally Posted by Cathar
This is all getting back to designing small, quiet and efficient systems that sacrifice very minimal performance levels to large pump / large tubing solutions, while being easy to route in small cases.
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Looks like one of the big areas for improvement in most systems will be the transition from hose to barb. When (potentially) a mere two barbs will have more pressure drop than your tubing, you're looking in the wrong place to save pressure drop.
Thinking about it, a system with badly selected barbs might be losing as much as 2m worth of pressure drop due to the barbs alone. For well designed barbs, you can presumably eliminate the pressure drop from the hose-barb interface almost entirely. The barb-block interface is more troublesome, particularly as the inside of blocks is non-standard.
At a guess, the ideal barb would look something like a standard riffled connector with the hollow thin walled cone from the Danger-Den Hi-Flow barbs on the end. The objective would be to ensure that when passing through the water experiences no change in section, while there is a large length of tubing stretched tightly over the barb (i.e. the barb OD is substantially greater than the tubing ID) and the barb is long enough to clamp easily.
I suspect this may be one of those cases where subtle system design choices that most people don't even think about come out to bite you without you ever realising it. It may turn out that with the amount of optimisation and investment that has gone into some areas (tubing size, block design, etc.) there is far more to gain by looking at other areas, at far less cost.