The waveguide greatly improve the power response, so the the entire upper frequency range become way more coherent and I definitely experience a much more stable stereo image and a way more focused sound stage. Waveguides are absolutely my thing 👌
I've played with several BE domes... Waveguides are needed still.. or else they just radiate uncontrolled in all directions. Some like that... I don't...
Almost. The softer domes have a more protruted shape, making them less ideal for waveguides. The harder material allow for a flatter dome shape, loading the waveguide more evenly, creating a much smoother response. Just look at Augerpro's great work... The proof is there... I can't take any credit...
Talking of KEF I like the IQ series for having concentric drivers with titanium vapoured cones / domes.
I like the Celeste for applying aluminium to the bass mid driver. In the sixties already.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...loudspeaker-sandwich-cone.402917/post-7762244
I like the Celeste for applying aluminium to the bass mid driver. In the sixties already.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...loudspeaker-sandwich-cone.402917/post-7762244
In case it helps: I’ve tried (and currently own) the following ceramic-coated metal tweeters:
I’ve also tried the following AlMg tweeters:
I prefer hard domes to soft domes because, as I perceive it, they portray percussive instruments like hi-hats, acoustic guitar & piano with more realism than soft domes, and I like that effect. Some of them can be a bit harsh-sounding though, especially if pushed too hard. Which is why the 29HD 2 and the T34A-4 are my favorites of the bunch… they can handle whatever you throw at them (crossing low and loud volume) while staying smooth.
In this regard, the Bliesma is on a whole higher tier, with 3mm excursion and the extra large dome. To me it sounds like an AMT in dome form. Truly unique capabilities.
Overall, there’s something really pleasing about the 29HD2’s sound that just sounds right and enjoyable to me. Smooth, a little dark, while still very detailed.
The SB is really cheap and an offers a good bang/$, but subjectively the 26HD3 is better and the 29HD2 way better IMO. I guess you get what you pay for. Except for the Seas King Coax… I just couldn’t get that one to ever sound right.
- Eton 29HD 2
- Eton 26HD 3
- SB Acoustics SB26CDC
I’ve also tried the following AlMg tweeters:
- Bliesma T35A-4
- The tweeter on the Seas King Coax
I prefer hard domes to soft domes because, as I perceive it, they portray percussive instruments like hi-hats, acoustic guitar & piano with more realism than soft domes, and I like that effect. Some of them can be a bit harsh-sounding though, especially if pushed too hard. Which is why the 29HD 2 and the T34A-4 are my favorites of the bunch… they can handle whatever you throw at them (crossing low and loud volume) while staying smooth.
In this regard, the Bliesma is on a whole higher tier, with 3mm excursion and the extra large dome. To me it sounds like an AMT in dome form. Truly unique capabilities.
Overall, there’s something really pleasing about the 29HD2’s sound that just sounds right and enjoyable to me. Smooth, a little dark, while still very detailed.
The SB is really cheap and an offers a good bang/$, but subjectively the 26HD3 is better and the 29HD2 way better IMO. I guess you get what you pay for. Except for the Seas King Coax… I just couldn’t get that one to ever sound right.
Thanks for the feedback,
When you see the spl curve on axis of the 29HD2, it very not straigth but a big plus and a big null : certainly one of the worst tweeter measurement I saw (datasheets). The darkness should come from the null maybe. Or when in small baffle, it maybe has a better curve....
Did you ended with the Eton 29HD3 or did you change since and finally lives with the Bliesma?
When you see the spl curve on axis of the 29HD2, it very not straigth but a big plus and a big null : certainly one of the worst tweeter measurement I saw (datasheets). The darkness should come from the null maybe. Or when in small baffle, it maybe has a better curve....
Did you ended with the Eton 29HD3 or did you change since and finally lives with the Bliesma?
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The poll is closing today ,the "Yes", cone material matters is the "winner"!
Thanks to all of you.👍
Thanks to all of you.👍
Well of course it does. Try making a cone or dome out of wet spaghetti and see how far you get. QED. Beyond that & the basic point that usually soft[er] cones will see more emphasis on HD2 and hard on HD3 / odd order, generalising is about as impossible as trying to teach a baboon how to design a Commodore 128. Even that latter aspect falls apart with obvious aspects like dome tweeters designed along the current fashion of using large roll surrounds to provide a substantial part of the rated Sd, which immediately puts HD2 up through its flexing, whatever the actual dome behaviour may (or may not) be. It falls flat on its face even within nominally similar materials too, the second you try to generalise, so if that's what you're hoping to achieve, I suspect you're in danger of heading up that famous garden path. 😉
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I agree with Scottmoose, it's all about the implementation. Soft domes and hard domes both can be exellent, and both can sound very bad. The dome material on it's own does not say anythng about the quality of the driver. It's how it's used in the total package, and with compression drivers the horn or waveguide is also an essential part of it. Even eq can be an essential part of a good tweeter sound.
In general, it is just way better to make a plan for the overall design of the finished speaker, budget, size, personal ability(design etc.) and max SPL. Then you can much easier figure out which type of tweeter that is best for a given purpose.
I just vote hard dome, since I like the potential lower distortion/clarity and good fit for my preference in waveguides.
Filter design with a DSP seems easier with hard domes, to tame them. But still... I haven't found a reason where soft domes were needed anymore. Hard domes can do it all - IMO.
Oh wait... the little 19mm in the Buchardt speakers are pretty good. But maybe it could be just as good, if it was a hard dome - who knows.
I just vote hard dome, since I like the potential lower distortion/clarity and good fit for my preference in waveguides.
Filter design with a DSP seems easier with hard domes, to tame them. But still... I haven't found a reason where soft domes were needed anymore. Hard domes can do it all - IMO.
Oh wait... the little 19mm in the Buchardt speakers are pretty good. But maybe it could be just as good, if it was a hard dome - who knows.
When I worked at Jensen I took a trip to Fujicone, a cone manufacturer owned by Jensen. They made the cones for the Bose 901s and for Jensen who made 70,000 speakers a day.
Visiting cone factories is like a strange voyage into an anachronistic witches brew cauldron of slurries and chemical paste and steam going everywhere... you almost feel like you're walking into the 1400s. You half expect a figure draped in black to come out of the steam with a crystal ball.
I talked to cone manufacturers all the time. You would call them up and say "Hey George I ran the curves on these speakers and I need more high end / I need a thicker cone / I want to try a felted cone instead of a pressed cone" or whatever.
They would cook something up for you and send you a few dozen sample cones, then rinse repeat until you got what you wanted.
I was puzzled as to how these guys had any objective sense of what they were doing. Was it all just witchcraft? Or did they have measurement equipment?
The chief engineer was this guy named George Pope. I asked him, "George do you have some speaker-driving fixture around here, that you stick all these cones on so you can run your own tests?"
"Nope. Here, let me show you how I evaluate a speaker cone." He walks us into the bathroom.
He says "This bathroom is super reverberant, it echoes for half a second when you snap your fingers. I just walk in here with a speaker cone and I flick the edge of the cone. A hard pressed paper cone makes a sharp crisp cracking noise. A soft felted cone makes a dull cardboardy sound. A poly cone makes a plastic-y sound. A metal cone makes a metallic sound. I don't measure anything. I just snap the edge of the cone in the men's room and listen to the echo. That tells me exactly what the cone is going to sound like."
Dang was that ever an epiphany for me. Because George flicking the cone is an impulse; and what you hear with your ears is an FFT.
That cone material has an intrinsic signature sound that is independent of the shape or size of the cone or whatever else it's attached to. It has its own signature sound.
From that point forward it was obvious to me that pressed cones have a certain sound, felted cones have a certain sound, dense vs. not dense, plastic vs paper vs metal. Same with tweeter domes. Same with compression driver diaphragms.
Now that I can use DSP to EQ any speaker to +/- 0.5dB I have personal experience that confirms: Paper has a signature sound, metal has a different signature sound, rubber surrounds have a signature sound, etc, and no EQ in the world changes that.
A frequency response curve is a 2D representation and simplification of a physical and experiential phenomenon that has dozens, perhaps hundreds of dimensions. There is no EQ that can make a paper cone sound like Beryllium.
Visiting cone factories is like a strange voyage into an anachronistic witches brew cauldron of slurries and chemical paste and steam going everywhere... you almost feel like you're walking into the 1400s. You half expect a figure draped in black to come out of the steam with a crystal ball.
I talked to cone manufacturers all the time. You would call them up and say "Hey George I ran the curves on these speakers and I need more high end / I need a thicker cone / I want to try a felted cone instead of a pressed cone" or whatever.
They would cook something up for you and send you a few dozen sample cones, then rinse repeat until you got what you wanted.
I was puzzled as to how these guys had any objective sense of what they were doing. Was it all just witchcraft? Or did they have measurement equipment?
The chief engineer was this guy named George Pope. I asked him, "George do you have some speaker-driving fixture around here, that you stick all these cones on so you can run your own tests?"
"Nope. Here, let me show you how I evaluate a speaker cone." He walks us into the bathroom.
He says "This bathroom is super reverberant, it echoes for half a second when you snap your fingers. I just walk in here with a speaker cone and I flick the edge of the cone. A hard pressed paper cone makes a sharp crisp cracking noise. A soft felted cone makes a dull cardboardy sound. A poly cone makes a plastic-y sound. A metal cone makes a metallic sound. I don't measure anything. I just snap the edge of the cone in the men's room and listen to the echo. That tells me exactly what the cone is going to sound like."
Dang was that ever an epiphany for me. Because George flicking the cone is an impulse; and what you hear with your ears is an FFT.
That cone material has an intrinsic signature sound that is independent of the shape or size of the cone or whatever else it's attached to. It has its own signature sound.
From that point forward it was obvious to me that pressed cones have a certain sound, felted cones have a certain sound, dense vs. not dense, plastic vs paper vs metal. Same with tweeter domes. Same with compression driver diaphragms.
Now that I can use DSP to EQ any speaker to +/- 0.5dB I have personal experience that confirms: Paper has a signature sound, metal has a different signature sound, rubber surrounds have a signature sound, etc, and no EQ in the world changes that.
A frequency response curve is a 2D representation and simplification of a physical and experiential phenomenon that has dozens, perhaps hundreds of dimensions. There is no EQ that can make a paper cone sound like Beryllium.
My limited experience is a same tweeter can sound different also the way you setup the mid filter. Should be the harmonics. With drivers that have good resolution and a DAC having the same and a good analog outputt stage, you can for illustration hear a big difference between 4 ohms serie in the mid between wirewound resistor or MOX.
I know the question was asked simply naive and several reasons can hide themselves behind what the question focus on.
I know the question was asked simply naive and several reasons can hide themselves behind what the question focus on.
So eperiment is on 3.9R serie on the mid (12 dB Bessel filter) here it made the upper midrange and low treble to sound thicker (weigther), darker. The surprise came on the tweeter register not affected in his filter (I mean each time the tweeter filter remains tthe same,so iso perimeter here). The low end tweeter sounded way more organic till trumpet register and cymballs.
The soundstage though is less good with mox than with a wirewound Mundorf Supreme, but the tones of the two mox Mundorf 10W in // are greater at a price of less dissaprering effect for the loudspeakers (less good soundstage). (caps set up is complex and 100% MKP)
I also tried some green cemented Vishay 5W metal film I like in electtronics : less resolved than the both above, an interresting mix with a Mundorf Supreme : you can have smoother sound and more meat than the Mundorf alone with better soundstage still than 100 % Mox. But ultimatly the mox alone gave something special in serie on the aluminnium 5" mid. On the aluminium tweeter the resistor is wirewound Mundorf Supreme.
90 hz to 2100 Hz acoustical for the mid (Bessel 12dB iirc) and >2100 Hz acoustical for the tweeter (40 dB elleptical + 12 dB bessel). Very clear an thin sounding speaker cable (basic Cardas).Dac TDA1541A, Pre Yamaha X2, amp : Chord (Mosfet)
The soundstage though is less good with mox than with a wirewound Mundorf Supreme, but the tones of the two mox Mundorf 10W in // are greater at a price of less dissaprering effect for the loudspeakers (less good soundstage). (caps set up is complex and 100% MKP)
I also tried some green cemented Vishay 5W metal film I like in electtronics : less resolved than the both above, an interresting mix with a Mundorf Supreme : you can have smoother sound and more meat than the Mundorf alone with better soundstage still than 100 % Mox. But ultimatly the mox alone gave something special in serie on the aluminnium 5" mid. On the aluminium tweeter the resistor is wirewound Mundorf Supreme.
90 hz to 2100 Hz acoustical for the mid (Bessel 12dB iirc) and >2100 Hz acoustical for the tweeter (40 dB elleptical + 12 dB bessel). Very clear an thin sounding speaker cable (basic Cardas).Dac TDA1541A, Pre Yamaha X2, amp : Chord (Mosfet)
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So what was the point? Since you say that, you presumably knew from the outset it was worthless.
Re #54 above, shades of a story the late (very great) Roger Russell recounts about a visit to the Bozak factory & their manufacturing of cones, by dropping a measured quantity of gloop into a bucket of water with a perforated former in the bottom. Gloop sank to bottom, former was pulled out & there you had a lovely (and they really are) Bozak cone -although as Roger said, goodness knows how Rudy came up with that pulp formula, with its tar, horse-hair etc. additives. The manufacturing method also automatically left the front smooth & the rear of the cone with a randomised rough texture. In fairness, there can (can) be a bit more to that side now, with specific paper densities & reinforcing additives (sometimes even geometric fibre-webs) added. And I know quite a few manufacturers who do simply get some samples from cone OEM producers & try the damn things out, if they don't keep the design of this side of things in-house. You can see why Ted Jordan liked alloy as there's almost total control / consistency providing the manufacturing tolerances are tight enough.
That said -there's a lot to this. Excluding exceptions like Jordans, Markaudio &c., the usual object behind using a rigid material (be it xyz metal, ceramic, diamond or whatever) for a cone or dome is to ensure it's operating under pistonic conditions over the intended BW. Well, that's mine, anyway. 😉 So assuming you've got such a driver & you use it within that BW, in theory there aren't any TL modes / resonances (you'd spot them in the impedance curve) & no direct signature at all from the cone itself, beyond the usual linear axial / off axis distortion from its profile etc. You may get indirect effects e.g. distortion amplification from insufficiently avoided or suppressed stopband breakup modes. Soft[er] cones / domes tend to be a little different as it's likely they'll have some form of TL modes / resonant operation going on even over the nominal piston BW, & those are potentially a source of colouration. So using the above example, agreed: it's very unlikely you'd ever make a paper cone sound like a beryllium, even if every single aspect other than the cone material was identical -which it almost certainly wouldn't be, because the materials have different properties & any half-competent manufacturer would adjust profiles, suspension, coil etc. to optimise as far as possible to the difference. The latter cone itself really shouldn't sound of anything at all, unless you try using it in a region where you're running into HD amplification or (even worse) the cone modes themselves, in which case you've only got yourself to blame. 😉 The former seems to be the issue some encountered with the Thor crossover. Something softer might be expected to have a bit more of its own character -no bad thing in many cases, since we're all selecting what distortion we like / can live with.
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