Best materials for drivers

[Joe_Carr]

I always wondered about this but what is the best type of material for tweeters? I noticed so far is silk dome tweeters been used most for studio monitors and home speakers but I wonder why? I always liked metal tweeters like titanium dome tweeters but seems like those aren't soo popular. My active monitors use silk dome tweeters with Neo magnets too. Well I guess there are Silk domes that use Ferrite magnets too. But my question is is silk tweeters the best for music, movies, games etc?


For woofers is polypropylene good? My Samson monitors use them and I have seen alot of speakers use this for there woofers. Even Dynaudio speakers use these.

[Hyfi]

personal preference

[JoeE SP9]

The choice of cone or dome material is irrelevant. What matters is how a given cone or dome sounds.

[recoveryone]

I am partial to the Linaeum tweeters :)

[GMichael]

I like the ones made of raritanium.

[Hyfi]

I like the ones made of raritanium.


Mine are made from unobtanium

[basite]

Mine are made from unobtanium


ooh yes, those surely beat the titanium ones...

beats raritanium too...

mine are made from enhanced Kryptonite, helps keeping superman away too... :D

[GMichael]

Mine are made from unobtanium
I can never find those. It's like no one sells them.:mad2:

[Luvin Da Blues]

ooh yes, those surely beat the titanium ones...

beats raritanium too...

mine are made from enhanced Kryptonite, helps keeping superman away too... :D


You guys are just confusing the OP. Every one knows that tweeters made from the ear skin of a shrill bat make the very bestest tweets. They go way past the limits of even dog's hearing.

[SlumpBuster]

I like the ones that taste like snozzberries.

[GMichael]

You guys are just confusing the OP. Every one knows that tweeters made from the ear skin of a shrill bat make the very bestest tweets. They go way past the limits of even dog's hearing.
I've never heard those.

[harley .guy07]

I like byriltialumatonium tweeters in my system. Honestly joking aside the reason they use silk domes in most studio monitors is that they are near field monitors or they are used very close to you so the obvious choice would be to go with the smoother less bright sounding driver which silk tweeters for the most part are and that is also why i prefer them in my speakers. I like a more listenable smooth treble and not fatiguing.

[bfalls]

Ribbon tweeters seem to be gaining popularity.

[Luvin Da Blues]

I've never heard those.

Obviously, you're not a Golden Eared Bat then.

[Joe_Carr]

I do see some monitors like the Samson Rubicon R5a - Active Ribbon Monitors that use Ribbon tweeters. I never really heard of these speakers but I would assume they sound good. But I wonder if silk dome tweeters are better since most monitors use silk dome tweeters.

[Smokey]

Understanding Differences in Tweeter Technology (http://www.electronichouse.com/article/understanding_differences_in_tweeter_technology/C155/D1/)

[harley .guy07]

Understanding Differences in Tweeter Technology (http://www.electronichouse.com/article/understanding_differences_in_tweeter_technology/C155/D1/)

I second reading this link it will explain things about all the tweeter designs to you and then you will be able to discern which one appeals to you best.

[basite]

I do see some monitors like the Samson Rubicon R5a - Active Ribbon Monitors that use Ribbon tweeters. I never really heard of these speakers but I would assume they sound good. But I wonder if silk dome tweeters are better since most monitors use silk dome tweeters.

in general: No.

a good ribbon, with a good integration with cone mid&bass, will outperform a silk dome tweeter...

A very important lesson in life: it's not because "most people/applications use them" that they are the best.

silk domes are good, when correctly done, there are rubbish ones too, but they have a good price/performance ratio, whereas a Ribbon is generally more expensive, but can yield far better results.



In general, it all depends on the design the manufacturer has got in mind. depending on other factors, they should choose for silk, alu, titanitum, beryllium, ... whatever, ribbons, coaxials, full ranges,..

there is no real "best", with merely a material in mind. every manufacturer has it's theory on which material they use, and why they think it's the best. Other manufacturers, just take an idea from someone else, and try to replicate it.

I also wonder on which studio monitors you're looking at, before stating "most use silk domes"...


Keep them spinning,
Bert.

[RGA]

I would pay no attention to the drivers but the resulting sound of the speakers since it's the overall sound not the sound of the individual driver that matters. The best speakers I have heard under $10,000 is the Audio Note E and J speakers which is why I bought the latter. It uses a paper woofer (now a Hemp woofer) and silk dome tweeter with no ferro-fluid or any other liquid cooling. Nothing is intrinsically fancy about the design but the integration is as good as two way designs get - it sounds like a single driver but it has a full range sound.

There are individual drivers that are superior - Plasma is impressive but you wind up paying $80,000 for a High Violoncello II and as terrific as it is it still doesn't integrate quite as well so you need a rather large listening room to sit far enough away for it to work bang on.

Quad changed their site which is too bad because they had a nice article about the selection of materials for their boxed speakers where their goal was to have two drivers in their two way with very similar sonic signatures as the drivers themselves have a "sound" and this mixing two very different materials such as a paper or poly woofers and any kind of metal tweeter runs counter to cohesive sound. IMO they're right. This is also why I have liked ESL panels (not the hybrids) and certain Planars.

But then comes efficiency - IMO the best amplifiers are Single Ended tube no or very low feedback varieties which often have low power. To me these amplifiers are several leagues above the better solid state amps including the no feedback class A SS amps out there that I have heard. Thus, for me if the speaker can't take advantage of what I consider the best front ends then even though the speaker is cohesive and has lots going for it, it won't make the cut for my long term music enjoyment.

There is more to it than just looking at drivers. The fine sounding Quad 2905 which is one of the two best panels under $15k for example sounds quite nice in the midrange, is said to require high power or I should say powerful amplifiers. In theory it has a lot of things it should do better than most boxes - things like distortion because it has a much lighter diaphragm and is said by the Quad guys to therefore move faster. But as Ken Kessler of High Fi News measured it has much higher THD and IM distortion than comparably prices B&W floorstanders which use Kevlar and Metal tweeters. And the frequency response from 200hz to 20khz was +/- 6.6db and the pair matching was off by +/-5.9db. Distortion at 90db was 1.36% and this is arguably the best panel for sane money out there. And they sound good despite the numbers (Ken Kessler Hi-fi News October 2006 issue)

And that's just it - despite the numbers and it also goes for the numbers on the individual drivers - there is a big dose of ART and "Listening" and the EAR involved over picking a driver out of a box and saying well this tweeter measures better than that tweeter and assuming that it will actually sound better. It might but then again it may sound much worse than a relatively unexciting measuring tweeter that is integrated with a woofer and cabinet properly.

[Geoffcin]

With tweeters you have two overriding problems, dispersion and distortion. Your question about what the best material to make it from would depend on design of the speaker itself. But if we stick to dome type tweeters, the latest designs are using exotic materials like Beryllium and vapor deposition Diamond. These exotic materials have the highest strength to weight ratio of any materials used for dynamic tweeters and as such have the lowest distortion when compared to similar tweeters made with more common materials like silk and Aluminum.

[basite]

... the latest designs are using exotic materials like Beryllium ...


but Yamaha's NS-1000's had that in 1974 already :)

but indeed, Beryllium is a "perfect" tweeter material, but there are others too!

[Mash]

Speciffic stiffness = E (Young's Modulus) / density.

These materials are also isotropic which makes their response in a forced-response vibratory enviroment fairly straightforward to predict.

Structures formed by a deposition process will invariably be orthotropic to a significant degree, and especially when one deposits a material like diamonds onto a substrate. The response of an orthotropic material in a forced-response vibratory enviroment is very complicated to predict.

[dvjorge]

Berilium and Titanium tweeters are too bright to me. Silk is a good material but still no as realistic as a simbal sounds.. Aluminum is the best I have heard so far. Peerles,Vifa, etc.

[badhabit67]

I guess, untill the techno gods bless us with something else,were stuck with the junk we have now. Oh,well I'm happy with my junk,they sound good to me......Especially the junk in my avatar.

[Mash]

Beryllium is toxic.

Understatement Alert:

The toxicity of Beryllium complicates the manufacturing process.