World's Best Tweeters Face-off :: Subjective comparison

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#442
My Raals are still going strong, after being hornloaded down to 2kHz for 2-3 years. Going to add another compression driver for upper midrange to see how that sounds like. I have had an allergy for anything heavier than .001 grams-something in the high frequency for a while.

What did you go for instead? Plasma? Bluetooth portable speaker?
 
#443
Rewind said:
My Raals are still going strong, after being hornloaded down to 2kHz for 2-3 years. Going to add another compression driver for upper midrange to see how that sounds like.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Please keep us posted. I have TPL-150H and have considered a 2" CD for the midrange but have to buy the CD and grew concerned of the center to center distance between such large tweeter and midrange, at 2kHz. Interested in learning how things pan out for you.
 
#444
One word. Iwata. 🙂 it shrinks a large horn vertically and also has a more relaxed sound than round horns. This system has to be time-aligned in DSP for space constraints. The directivity suffers so you have to sit and stare into the throat to get good highs. And with a deep horn it is no longer in supertweeter territory. I almost need another pair of Raals above ~10kHz.
 

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#445
Rewind said:
One word. Iwata. 🙂 it shrinks a large horn vertically and also has a more relaxed sound than round horns. This system has to be time-aligned in DSP for space constraints. The directivity suffers so you have to sit and stare into the throat to get good highs. And with a deep horn it is no longer in supertweeter territory. I almost need another pair of Raals above ~10kHz.
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Your nice and dark room is...eeee...dark! 😱 not sure what I should see.
Iwata was in the cards. Still seems c-to-c would be large for 2kHz xo. But then I haven't tried it.
DSP time alignment is part of the system. No problem.
I wouldn't use the CD horn above 2kHz so directionally in the treble wouldn't be that big of an issue.

How low do you plan to take the midrange horn? 2kHz down to...?
 
#446
Forgot to switch the light on. I will start with 1400Hz and then I don't know. People use Raal from 12kHz, but I think that is wasteful.

The Fane Studio 8M is not doing much at the moment and probably never will. The 15" will hopefully be replaced by a midbass compression driver soon.
 

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#453
Iwata like

Rewind said:
Forgot to switch the light on. I will start with 1400Hz and then I don't know. People use Raal from 12kHz, but I think that is wasteful.

The Fane Studio 8M is not doing much at the moment and probably never will. The 15" will hopefully be replaced by a midbass compression driver soon.
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Interesting jmove; is the horn profile based upon one of the jmlc spreadshits ?
May you share the details of the making process ?

Thank you
 
#454
RAAL said:
When the project allows for it, in 3-way, I do not use a single 6-7" cone driver for the mid range, but a group of 6 x 3" Aluminum cone full-range drivers. Those have the first problem at 11k (a 3dB high peak), so they allow the above explained approach to bloom to it's full potential. And they will surpass any single cone driver in dynamics and clarity, no matter the kind.

And so on and so forth...thank you for the attention!
Click to expand...

Old thread I know......but mind sharing how you would align those 6 fullrange drivers?..........vertical array, cluster, mmmmtmmmm?
 
#456
RAAL said:
Well, the point of all things is to use them if and where they make a difference.

I can't stress enough that system integration makes a world of difference.
You can't just slap two drivers together and hope for the best...

As for the ribbons, the use of full DSP capability doesn't fit them well. Actually, that doesn't fit any tweeter, but much larger surface area (AMTs) or stiff suspension (dome tweeters) will cope better with that problem. I'll explain.

With DSP, people usually go for high order slopes, like 48db/oct or even brickwall.

Let's say we have a 2-way with 7" bassmid and a 140-15D ribbon. The crossover point is at 3k and we use a brickwall filter.

In that situation, what SPL this 7" will put out at 2999Hz, the tweeter will have to do same at 3001Hz.
We are talking here of 6:1 or 5:1 surface area ratios in favor of the bassmid, which also has much greater directivity at the same frequency.

Asking that system to behave as you would wish is simply not possible. If you want something to match something, without blending in the crossover region, those two somethings will have to be the same.
If they are not, then the smaller one of the two (in this match made in digital heaven) will produce proportionally more distortion.

The power of musical signal drops with rising frequency and this fact is used for decades in loudspeaker system integration with great success, for alleviating tweeters from excessive stress and reducing the overall distortion at and around the crossover frequency.
Using sharp slopes in DSP based systems negate this.

Let's take the same 7" bassmid and a 140-15D ribbon system, but now with 2nd order Bessel or Linkwitz-Riley at 3k.

These filter types will have -5 and -6dB at the crossover point, respectively, and a very gentle slope between the crossover point and zero (maximum) level, stretching to about 10k.
If you use that kind of filtering at 3k, you have halved the tweeter excursion at the crossover point and you're counteracting the musical power response with a gentle rise from -5-6dB at 3k to zero at 10k.

There is catch, though. You should have a very flat and far-reaching bass-mid and you'll have increased between 2k and 5k. Therefore, a physical time alignment is necessary, so you would have the crossover region beaming to propagate horizontally through the space (very important stuff).

In practice, bass-mids are not that good, have garbage above 4k, nor the RAAL are flat all the way down, so I use filters that are closer to Butterworth than to Bessel or L-R, to get what I want in acoustical domain.

The goal is to get the best impulse response possible, that looks like it's coming from a single speaker. That means that phase tracking and time alignment are accurate, so the blending is accurate. Combined impulse response has to measure good, if you're going to move to the next step - voicing it by ear.

Attached here is how a S-S Illuminator 7" 4Ohm + RAAL 140-15D look like in response together, nothing but 2nd order, with Zobel network on S-S:

Now, if isn't done right down to the detail (and that usually takes time), all talk of realistic sound of this or that, or micro-macro dynamics is pointless...Especially if you don't have your own recordings to use as a reference point. I do and people that I design the speakers for, do also, and telling here what they think of the monitors would feel like tasteless bragging.

Simply, the sound is made by the complete interaction between components.
For some anomalies, you compensate, some are sorted out on the own, some you will never solve, whatever you speaker integration approach is.
In the end, once you do everything right with the crossover, baffle size, time-alignment, dampening, voicing, positioning in the room...you're left with inherent quality of the drivers used to define the sound.
While RAALs are not ideal, nothing is, they will do 2.5-3k with no problems whatsoever, regarding dynamics and distortion, when used in accordance to long established good practices in speaker integration, and from that point on, it will be very, very hard to match that performance. Sounds stupid when I say it, but I'm not the only one, so I'm not blushing when saying it.

As you can see, I reverted back to 2nd order filters (in both 2-way and 3-way) as I get the best combined impulse response with them. While the cleanup of bass-mid's upper-end garbage is not as effective as with higher orders, the sound is better than if the impulse response does not look like this.

When the project allows for it, in 3-way, I do not use a single 6-7" cone driver for the mid range, but a group of 6 x 3" Aluminum cone full-range drivers. Those have the first problem at 11k (a 3dB high peak), so they allow the above explained approach to bloom to it's full potential. And they will surpass any single cone driver in dynamics and clarity, no matter the kind.

And so on and so forth...thank you for the attention!
Click to expand...

Hi RAAL,

Would a 70-20XR intergrate well with a Volt VM752, and if so, what crossover frequency would you use? The VM752 has a very wide bandwidth and great resolution but sometimes I wonder if using maybe qnty 4x ScanSpeak 10F/8424 in series-parallel wouldn't be better maybe in a MMTMM configuration. The sensitivity of the four 10F's would be a natural match to the 70-20XR's circa 92dB 6.3ohm tap.

Also, the recommended XO for the 70-20XR says that it will be 4th order with the addition of a coupling cap. Is there a way to get the slope closer to 2nd order to blend in better with the four SS 10F's?

Thanks,
X
 
#457
angeloitacare said:
hi Ben

i have heard the Fostex tweeters. I like them, but nothing of the sort of the h100. The only other tweeters at the h100 level are Goto's, YL's, ALE's etc. The very expensive japanese high-end stuff. My Beymas TPL150 which i listen to now has the advantage of sounding amazingly natural, and the treble does not attract any attention to it. But it has not the dynamics, sharpness, precision and ease of the Coral. Its not king of awe inspiring or spectacular. Its just different. A work horse with its excellence of its own.
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As you have experience with Fostex tweeters such as the T900A, please share your thoughts on Troy Crowe’s passive crossover.

And on his “lens” waveguide for improving the measured performance and perceived sound quality of the 900As.

Please describe the sound of the 900A or other such Fostex tweeters: Sound stage width/depth/height size, imaging, off-axis response, size of dispersion pattern vs. dome tweeters, smoothness, tonality. Free of brightness, hardness, “hashy” sounding, metallic or “pinging” sound, and/or other artifacts.

Obviously, I’m hoping that Troy’s crossover and lens can correct any such problems with these tweeters.

Also, any particular amplifiers which you might recommend using with speakers using these tweeters?

Finally, if you are a movie fan like me then you are likely aware that the audio from lossy Dolby Digital on DVDs and even lossless DTS-MA on BDs or from streaming is not always the most pristine. So, while typically using these speakers for music listening, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best, how would you rate speakers using the T900A tweeters for reproducing typical movie quality sound? Would the T900A-even with Troy Crowe’s fixes-still be the wrong tweeter to use for typical movie sound?
 
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