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In the Forum: Audio News
In the Thread: The best speaker in the world, is yet again available
Post Subject: Did somebody mention my name?!?!Posted by morricab on: 11/8/2007
Hi Romy,
I see now you are throwing around the term "absolute tone" in a relative manner again 
. Why would you want to neutralize absolute tone and with a metal tweeter no less!! You are talking about a tweeter "absolute tone" offsetting a port noise "absolute tone"....Hmmm I think someone spiked your kitty food with catnip! Back in the old days they called that Boom and Tizz or "west coast" sound courtesy of JBL.
The ONLY truly invisible tweeter that I have had the privilege to listen to is an ion tweeter, like acapella or lansche audio. If the diamond tweeters were to blame for the bad sound I heard from speakers with them is their fault or not I don't know. The ion tweeter is essentially massless as well! Has no materials colorations (although it is colored optically ) as well. The next best tweeters I have heard are ribbons and eletrostatic drivers. While not being completely colorfree they are very open and natural sounding. Especially long ribbons (like Apogee, which will play down to about 300Hz) have an easy open quality that is hard to beat. When I think about WHY they are superior to the typical dome I come back to one simple point, NO high frequency resonance!! A good ribbon goes easily to 30 or 40Khz and then just rolls away. Electrostats also have no high frequency resonance to intefere with crystal clear (no pun intended!) highs. This is also why nasty eletronics are so easily shown up with such drivers.
I sure would have loved to hear the Hill Plasmatronic speaker. He had a HUGE Helium plasma (needed a tank of helium and looked like lab equipment) that went down all the way to 750Hz!! I think that would be an nearly ideal mid/high driver but matching it to a conventional driver would be hard and was probably why the speaker was not that successful. The plasma tweeters today only go down reasonably to a few Khz before they need to hand off to another driver.
Personally, I think they should have bit the bullet and put in a diamond tweeter as well. If their design is good by running the mid down to 500Hz or whatever and the highs should be good to about 10Khz with that 2.5 inch mid then I think they could have a winner on their hands. My guess is that they felt this funky titanium/gold tweeter was a good price/performance compromise. I don't know what its measurements look like and how bad it resonates but I am sure that it does. The diamond tweeter pushes it far enough out of the audio band that it is no longer problematic.Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site