Tweeter Designs - Page 4

Cool it guys.

Im 41, that isnt too old. Im just more fortunate to have success that was created by having skills. You ragged on me about not having tastes so I pointed out the facts sorry if you do not like the facts. No bentley (EVER, that is for my good friend a block down), I traded the BMW in for a Minivan because it fits a ton more with 2 kids and a dog.

Btw, I have ribbons too. Never said they sucked period, I just have better designs with ribbons then some silly 6 foot panel you think is WAF

It might, it depends on the builds Im doing and how much someone needs help moving away from the following audiophile BS that happens daily online.

How long do you keep a speaker that you've made before something else catches your fancy, Penn?

don't ask me that

Just a constructive thought here, but if you're even remotely as smart and educated about building speakers as you desperately try to portray yourself to be, to the point that you can make such great designs that are so much better and superior to anything else on the market at double or even quadruple (or more) the price because of all your awesome knowledge and experience, and since you obviously have all this spare time on your hands, why don't you do us all a favor and form your own company to start selling your awesome designs?

Not to defend pengray, but in general, when taking a DIY design into production, it will up it's cost by a factor of 4-10.

So that nice DIY speaker with $2K in parts would cost a cool $8-20K to produce.

It's easy(er) to play ulta high end with DIY, no so much commercial speakers.

Or another way to think of that is that $4K commercial speaker is lucky to have $100 drivers. Of course there is a LOT more to good speakers design than expensive drivers (the crossover is where the work is if it's passive).

The DIYer also has nobody else to satisfy but himself.


Very true, and often overlooked by the DIYer.

For you proponents of horns, my understanding is that horns give up high frequency extension in favor of efficiency, so I have been trying to find measurements for horn tweeters. Not that easy to come by, but generally speaking, the measurements I have found do seem to rolloff well before 20khz.

Can you guys point me to measurements (hopefully more than just a few) that show some extension to 20khz and beyond?

There's a review at Soundstage of a Cerwin Vega CSL-15 that uses waveguides for the tweeter and midrange. Not a horn though. Maybe some of the folks that are marketing speakers with horn tweeters will post their measurements, on and off axis (hopefully not done by taking them to some cow pasture and running test tones with a mic in the dead of a silent night).

Well, yeah, and I am not looking for Rat Shack meter stuff either....those things are way off in the higher frequencies.

HF extension isn't given up in favor of efficiency, it more that if you want your compression driver and horn to play low (say 500hz) then it'll need a big diaphragm (say 3-4") and that will limit HF extension. Easy way round that is to make your speaker a three way and add a horn and CD that is more suited to HF.

My three way's have the big mid horn crossing at 400hz and 7.2Khz.

Two ways will cross at 800-1.8Khz which means you can have a smaller compression driver diaphragm which will make it to 15Khz.

Here's a Fostex HF horn that plays over 20Khz on axis.

https://www.madisound.com/store/manu...s/t925arev.pdf

The first timer perhaps, but never the more seasoned DIYers.


Not necessarily, it depends upon the design of the driver and the intended goal. Horns and WGs gain extra sensitivity by constraining the radiation pattern from say a hemisphere (dome on a baffle) to say 90° x 40°.
You're not looking very hard then. Every manufacturer publishes datasheets with FR plots. Whilst it's true that most CD's don't extend beyond 18kHz or so, after doing quite a bit of experimenting with the Tannoy supertweet, a Fostex and a Visaton all with extended HF some years ago, even the young people we roped in couldn't reliably tell the difference between 18k and extension beyond that. As RBCD is still the dominant medium and is constrained to 22k I don't see the point in it. I'd rather have 18k and below working better.

Maybe I am not, but you seemed to have confirmed what I have found though, correct?

Were these young people critical listeners? I know, that even on my computer speakers, that if I play a 20khz tone, while I can perceive it, my kids can definitely hear it. Audiologists also say that the body picks up HF in many different ways, not just via the ear.

Thanks Steve...

So there is one. This certainly isn't the norm, is it? The graph is interesting.

Rather than illustrate the FR capabilities of a single driver, what about for a finished commercial product?

There are dedicated drivers that will do it, but they are less common. JBL for instance use them on the last few TOTL models, Everest series, DD66000.

Whilst this is certainly an expensive speaker, in terms of modestly priced drivers, there is one Fostex Steve has presented, and even the FT17H goes very high and there are designs such as the Beyma CP21 that have no trouble exceeding 10k.

None the less, I see extreme HF as pretty irrelevant and most domes will only do it on axis.


Critical in the sense of trying very hard to detect the presence of extreme HF or not. But not wanker audiophile "critical listeners", no.
Can you present some measurements to show that your computer speakers are actually playing beyond 20kHz?

I have an Australian friend at work...I can hear his voice saying Wanker right now

Love it!

My (horn) 2-ways are crossed at 420 Hz for the woofer bin and 470 Hz for the HF horn. I don't know why there is a difference, but there is. Something to do with acoustic crossover verses electronic crossover I think ()

Regardless, two fine chaps once visited my home and brought some of their testing equipment. This has probably been 3-4 years so pardon my butchered memory....

As I recall, I was able to hear the tone up to maybe 15K and it went on up to 18K before it got weird.

1. Speaker building is an art form...Im no artist and I never said I have my own designs. Its like model building, building a house, building a cabinet, building anything.....there are directions to follow. I take the easy way out with digital XOs, I can tweak in room until it suits my needs. No need to build passive XOs that do not always work out.

2. There isnt enough profit in it. Remember, I like free time so why work my ass off 100 hours a week like the John Janowitz, Mark Seatons, etc of the world to make a business that has too many competitors and very hard to be ultra successful. I did the 100+ hours per week for over 10 years from the age of 23 to the age of 33....Im enjoying more life now.

3. Enough expert DIYers exist that we can just copy their designs. I have never posted that Im an expert speaker builder I just have resources to test and play with many options.

4. Even if I became sort of an expert. Jon Marsh, Curt C, Brandon Thill, Lynn Olson, Jed M, Paul W and so many more names I can not think of this second are incredible speaker designers, better then 99% of those speaker builders working for some audio companies..You would be shocked on how many design plans exist, nothing sold out there comes close to the details and SQ of the top DIY products. They build and post all information for others to copy for free. If you do not want to build them then buy the kits sold my Jed and Curt on PE or Madisound. Why remotely try to sell something when the best builds exist for free anyways.

5. Mark Seaton, Jim Salk, Tom Danley, Earl Geddes and so on and so on build incredible speakers. The industry has too many speaker companies to start with and if some of the best speakers go unoticed then no one else has a chance (Ie. Good luck to Craig Sub and his speaker company).

5. Like others posted the reason DIY designs that cost $2K = $8K commercial products is because our time is free and we have zero overhead costs to associate back to the product.

Now before anyone says why again is this about DIY, I never brought up DIY others keep asking questions and I do not mind answer the questions.

Back to the tweeter design. I still think the tweeter has to have constant directivity (vertical and horizontal) and has to have enough max SPL to handle the dynamics and distances of a HT room.

You find the tweeter that does both and you will have a good start.

Have you read Geddes opinion on this.....More or less there is no need for those high frequencies. None of it up there is remotely accurate so its just people use to hearing some "Noise" beyond the critical frequencies.

Paul W's Raptor build won some listening awards at a DIY event in Atlanta and he uses a large waveguide...you can see his measurements here.
http://www.htguide.com/forum/showthread.php4?t=35812

Btw, your point is a valid one. People have to understand all compromises involved. Pick your compromise and enjoy!

There has been many builds that put a "super tweeter" on top for that last high, high frequency range. There seems to be an interesting combination of large horn running 500Hz to 8K Hz then adding a super tweeter on top, See "beyond the Ariel" thread on DIYaudio.com with Lynn Olson. That design (Gary Dahl's build) seems to get the critical listening range 500Hz to 5KHz with one driver that has constant directivity and maximized effeciencies.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi...ml#post2274618

These builds have more tweaking and testing then any speaker build a manufacturer would do...there is no cost savings in it for a manufacturer to fuss over the little nitty gritty. Its why DIYers can do it better, time/over head is free.


My next horn design will be a larger horn getting the XO down to maybe 700Hz.

I thought I was obviously being sarcastic, but maybe not if you actually thought I was being serious.

Bingo! That's the exact magic words I was looking for, but never thought you'd actually admit.

It doesn't actually matter if you are serious or not, its still a question.

As for the art form, you should realize that ALL designs start with hard core science and hard core measurements. They never go anywhere without science and measurement. All the best designs start with accuracy and the final product is tweaked to suit specific individual perferences. Its the reason why I like Active designs because I can take the designs that have superior accuracy and tweak them in room to my own curve.

You are stuck with inaccurate designs that sound good to you...its all backwards how people pick speakers.

No, I can not. All I can say is that I could barely perceive the tone, whereas my kids begged me to turn it off.

You really shouldn't flatter yourself so much.


Yes Sherlock, I'm well aware of the very obvious fact that they all should, as that is just plain old common sense that doesn't exactly require an degree in engineering to understand, as it seems to me you are trying to imply in yet another attempt to flatter yourself, but I sure wouldn't go so far to say what you did that they all actually do.


Since you specifically said "you" in a post directly after mine, I'll take it you are talking to me. Well, you don't know what I have or how I have it set up. Lets just say that I'm very well aware of the benefits of DEQX.

Unlike you, I don't have infinite spare time on my hands to keep going back and forth over this, so I'm out for now like your 50" pool side plasma.

And there you have it. The premise of this thread is flawed. Which tweeter type is best? It all depends on goals, implementation, and its integration within the larger speaker design. Good discussion though.

Penn: What I really want to know is when you are going to break down and buy some Catalysts?

Chris

The best?

Depends on the application, but for a normal room of 15x15 up to 20x20, I would recommend:



The Ceradome tweeter design. It's a ceramic based XBL tweeter driver capable of a crossover frequency down to 1.5KHz with a 24db/octave slope and has an ultra-wide dispersion that makes it's axis response beat the pants off most other tweeter that even dare to give response anything like it:



Look at that axis response graph. It holds a virtually identical response pattern at 60-degrees off-axis all the way to 15KHz!!! BTW, 15KHz is the point at which the vast majority of listeners find they start having a strong rolloff of their own ability to hear sound. So, this tweeter will deliver virtually perfect 60-degree axis sound. That's just ridiculous.



Look at the distortion measurements on this tweeter. Nothing short of amazing. This will lend itself to keeping distortion low even when being driven fairly loud. If you set this tweeter to a 2KHz crossover with a nicely steep slope, it should be able to get very loud and clean. But the point of this baby is that you can go low, 1.5KHz low. That allows you to use a larger midrange than you would normally use and still maintain a wide dispersion response to match the tweeter's.

Quote from the site:
This graph shows the stunning THD performance of this tweeter; the distortion curves were raised 30 dB to even be able to see the curves. Measured at 2m distance (96 dB SPL @ 1m equivalent), the THD, 2nd, and 3rd harmonic are all shown to be amazingly low. At 1.4 kHz, THD is less than 1%; above 2 kHz, all harmonics are below 0.5% even at 96 dB SPL output.

http://www.acousticdev.com/cms/index...ized&Itemid=59

The unfortunate thing? You cannot just order this tweeter. I've tried to and it's only available to speaker companies ordering large production runs. The only person you could possible contact is Dan Wiggins (dan@acousticdev.com) and he clearly told me that this tweeter is not available for individual sale. I would have bought it for a DIY project for my car stereo and even bought extras for an eventual home audio DIY speaker project. Not being able to own these is KILLING me!

My design would be a 3-way satellite with an 8-inch midbass (70Hz - 400Hz) /4.5-inch midrange (400Hz - 1.5KHz/ceradome tweeter.

Wow, white people are messed up.

I can hear the tone.