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Tweeters Alignment - what is a bitchy subject! I was mildly complaining about it for years and during the last few weeks I complain about my own tweeters - primary because the very same issues of the imperfect alignment. This there is a derivation of the thread: An amplifier for Tweeters and I will start here when I finished in there....

It is well known that HF channels should be time aligned however it is not really know to majority of people to which degree of precision that alignment should be done, what variables are involved, what negative consequences Sound has if the tweeters are unaligned (misaligned? disaligned?... go figure). Also it is not clear for public how not properly aligned tweeters negatively affect listening experiences. I will slowly collect form my mind the bookmarks of my experiences on the subject and will be posting them in this thread.

As few words about the perspective beneficiaries of this thread. If you use 2-way monitors then you might skip reading further. My definition of tweeter is something that starts to operate after a MF driver. It is irrelevant what cut off your MF driver has but you should have a fully functional MF channel. In my world of compression drivers, when the drivers run up to 8kHz-13kHz the tweeter are something the come, AFTER the MF drivers. If your tweeter kicks in at 3 kHz-4kHz then skip reading further – you have no MF driver and this thread is not for you.  My experience indicates that ~90% of people out there among those who used stand alone tweeters have their tweeters unaligned. I practically never head any HF capable horn installation with properly sounding HF.  As I said: people who use box speakers has some baffle reference but the horn folks have mostly no geometrical reference points as their damn horns are usually very big and there is no space for tweeters reference baffle.

I am sure you heard a lot of horn installation and you have noticed that most of the compression driver, although in their papers they go up to 20.000Hz but in realty they all die much sooner. Some people do not extend their MF compression drivers (if their specific MF does have good HF and the room allows it) and listen then systems without complimentary tweeters. I do it sometime as well but only in the case of the very specific recordings. Generally people and I agree with them do use some kind of tweeter that kick after the regular MF compression driver. So, if you did hear a lot of horn installations then you know that MF and tweeters combined very really sound “properly”.

It would be nice to blame tweeters phase misalignment for everything but it would not be correct: there are a lot of reasons why tweeters and MF did not sound like one entity. However, time misalignment does play a huge role in there. I know that most of the people out there do not play serious music that requires a perfect time alignment. It mostly happens because of ignorance, not only musicals but audio ignorance. Let me to assure you that when one would learn how to detect in reproduced sound the evidences of tweeters misalignment then it would be much more difficult for this person to listen a tweeters misaligned playback.

It would not be difficult to describe a contribution of misaligned tweeters but I would like do not do it as explicit “education” but rather offer you’re a change to rediscover the subject for yourself.  Let start for instance from a suggestion that the well know to anybody artificial effects of reproduced sound: narrow sounding sibilants, fast sounding shibilants, loud sounding fricatives are not due to the “wind form singer’s mouth blow into the microphone grill”. In 99% of all occasions those artificial effects because the phase anomalies and the HF transducers are primary guilty parts. Even more – even if the recording made badle and the recording has “taught sounding “TH” and “SS” then a “properly aligned” tweeter might greatly “fix” the situation.

The next post I will outline some techniques how you might educate yourself about the subject of tweeters phase misalignment and what methods you might use to resolve the problems

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