aluminium or magnesium ceramic coated, your experience please

Tweeters, according your experience, does the cone material matters or not ?


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Hello,

there is two school with simplified talking about dome tweeters : to make it simple, at iso THD & T/S, two drivers will sound the same if the same spl curve.

The second one is it will not because each cone material is sounding different (Hificompass, Troels Gravsen for instance).

I'd like to know if the ceramic coated tweeter is making it to sound different w or w/o this coating. Some say it is just for the looking or against corosion (magnesium dome ?)

Does is sound alike a berylium or a 100% ceramic one ? Some talk about a more relaxed sound with those last both?! As far i know, the motor design seems much more important in the result of micro dynamics at those frequencies.

We don't care, i.e. the spl curves matters first ? Purchase a DSP or EQ any cheap good tweeter with good THD enough (SB26 CDC for instance) if you like white domes and sleep better ?

You may enter your choice preference and experiences in a post about a material if you voted YES. You can also input why according your experience a NO makes sense.

Thanks
 
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If you want a serious poll:

Equalize one example of the two types of dome drivers -on identical baffles- to have identical level and transfer functions (not an easy job!), record and make a sound clip. Post the sound clips here and let the participants tell which one of the clips is which one.

Opinions we have more than enough here lately.
 
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I matched a soft dome response to a Titanium dome and also an Aluminium version in da previous century using analogue technology (complicated passive xovers). The results were indistinguishable in DBLTs.

There's important stuff you have to match too particularly the dome size and also the thermal & compressive behaviour. I could do this as it was part of the development of a new treble unit.

If you are using DSP, the common naive inverted FIRs are suboptimal and can be detected in some DBLTs
 
"If you are using DSP, the common naive inverted FIRs are suboptimal and can be detected in some DBLTs"

Do you mean symmetric FIR with FR compensating for bumps and holes in the tweeter's FR to make it ruler-flat? Without reflecting zeros inside the unit circle to create a minimum phase filter?
 
Do you mean symmetric FIR with FR compensating for bumps and holes in the tweeter's FR to make it ruler-flat? Without reflecting zeros inside the unit circle to create a minimum phase filter?
This isn't the only type of naive FIR EQ but it is one, which in my Jurassic DBLTs, was marked down (by those who could tell the difference) compared to Minimum Phase IIR EQ.
 
Hi @Boden & @drewmc ,

Thanks for the proposal and your 'pinion but this is not what I ask. I ask if you have experienced it?

I want serious answers. I talked about experiences not checking audio reccordings or graphic measurements.
I don't think you should ask a member, the diversity of answers would be even more confusing. If you want to test the difference hang each tweeter in the center of the room in mid air, no baffle at all. Make a recording of each and on axis and off axis and then in whatever audio software you have lay the two responses on top of each other and see the differences. Then it is up to you to decide which you like best and listen to them individually, do not have any other speakers involved as well as using the full frequency spectrum to ascertain the cross-over point most suitable.
If you want someone here to choose your tweeter on your behalf, don't.
I have experienced magnesium and aluminum dome tweeters but I don't like them at all. I personally prefer silk dome.
 
thanks about testimonial of your personal preference. It is of course a poll about members experience feedback not a question on how I could do if purchasing all of them and answer it myself. 🙂

The little I know is whatever what I have tried I need a diving curve of 5 to 10 dB from 1k/2k hz at 3.5 meters to listen to music in my already damped room. But I wondered beyond the question of pistonic behavior if some hard dome tweeters have different je ne sais quoi related to the dome composition itself.
Some have noticed the good Be to sounds more natural, but some others says the same for Textremne carbon layers... this is already confusing. I saw often the Be for illustration have a recessed spl and are often not straigth spl curve and even more confusing off axis. Or some others noticed an aluminium of a bigger diameter sounds better than the little Be brother (Bliesma), some others not, all experienced designers here.

Not saying some hybrid tweeters that makes not easy to conclude about a patern. For instance the Seas 22 TAF/G hard 3/4 alu dome with partial fabric arround like some ring dome. Or the opposite, the top of the line Wavecor tweeter with little fabric dome at the center and ceramic cone around.

So my average logic thinks it is mainly about SPL curve at iso perimeter, but some very experienced guys that have more monney than myself and can perform many tries, input than the material matters more than I would believe. Often it seems it is about internal damping of the dome material between two hard domes technology. But I have pain to imagine how it could be heard if the spl curve is the same.

I notice whatever brands say about ligthness of those dome, they almost have always the same weigth whatever the material, so it could be the thickness variation, but I surmise the voice coil is a good part of the weigth... always. Maybe break ups modes I dunno.

But this is not a thread about to explain, but more a thread about : Does the extra price between two hard domes matters and ultimatly still matters between soft and hard dome.
 
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So you consider anecdotal testimonies without any foundation "serious answers"?

No this is not what I said. I found your shortcut not very fair here btw. Looks to me bad dialectic, I don't see why testimonies should be "always" anecdotal as you phrase it, I assume in this forum, people owned many loudspeakers or made projects because we are passionate enthusiasts.

I ask about experience I haven't. I actually have some but less than many whom tried a ton of tweeters. There is of course a difference between opinion and experience. Opinion could be a too fast generalisation of an isolated experience for illlistrutation, but I am not against opinions as well, it is to the reader to sort out apples and oranges.

It is a limited 15 days poll btw, so itis intended to be short.
 
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I've always liked larger soft domes they seem more gentle to my ears(my hearing is not good)I find metal domes shrill to much at higher volumes.
I come from more of a car audio background, inside a car with all that glass metal dome tweeters always seem to hot and ear piercing even at low/medium volumes.
 
"You may enter your choice preference and experiences in a post about a material if you voted YES. You can also input why according your experience a NO makes sense."
If I understand the question correctly the OP want only a YES or NO answer.So my vote is NO. I don't like metal it resembles a Piezo horn which is a metal disc with substrate on it like telephone earpieces of the 60's
 
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I've found Accuton tweeters to be generally very good. Other tweeters that I was able to compare them to were mostly "mystery soft-domes" with that generic Vifa / Peerless look.

One thing that was always noticeable was the attention-grabbing "locational presence" of the Accutons, for want of a better description. As a friend put it, the sound was "right there".

In hindsight, I think there was a mix of diffraction effects and amplifier distortion combined, which prevented a disappearing act from occurring. The very wide dispersion means that any sharp corners at the edge of the box will be subjected to almost the same SPL as on-axis. Then the brain's internal processing hears things like interference patterns to help triangulate the speaker's location. With soft-domes it's not so easy because they tend to be more directional.

As for aluminium vs ceramic vs anodized, I don't know. Maybe there are some subtle differences. Aluminium cones are conductive, so there's a limit to close they can be mounted to the magnet before they start to distort.
 
It's not the material, it's how it's used that determine the sound in my experience. But harder materials can sound harder and gritter easier than soft materials, and are harder to make sound soft. But some of my favorite tweeters like the SB26ADC and the Faital HF-201 use metal domes and sound very smooth and gentle. The thing is to keep the resonances of hard material drivers out of the passband, or damp them in one or another way stronly so they don't bother anymore. That is more difficult with hard materials than with soft, but it's not impossible or really expensive (see the cheap SB26ADC).
 
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