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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Musique Concrete horns
Post Subject: Electricity and different compression drivers’ diaphragms.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 6/15/2007

 RonyWeissman wrote:
The electricity comment is interesting as today I put on some jazz music and the HF is very snappy, excellent! I feel like posting on AA to ask people's opinons if it's the electricity or if my concrete horns are going through a break-in period  8-)  .  The guy that cleans the S2s does re-charge the magnets, i'm going to send him my T-350 tweeters at same time, just in case I do want to give them a try above 12.5k in the future. I'll change the speaker placement this weekend for more toe-out, then re-try Bartoli Live in Italy again.
Rony,

generally the better tweeter is the more sensitive it is for electricity. You might find at this site that over the years I was up in down over many tweeter solutions – in many instances I presume my judgment was clouded by the electricity problems, even I was familiar with them. Even knowing that bad electricity kills tweeters first it is still difficult to turn itself off from objective right or wrong sound when the damn electricity turned out to be good or bad.

You might find my comments about the subject worth reading:

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/psaudio/messages/1/10526.html

However, leaving the electricity alone there is other subject that should be taken under consideration – the specific type of diaphragms that is being use in compression driver.

People who use compression driver know that the type of the cone the driver uses is highly responsible for the sound of the driver. The materials, the size, the masses and propagation of masses, the type of the suspension and it’s implementation, the venting patterns, the type and the depth of the damping, and many-many other things are the very key in compression drivers. There are drivers that play saves: a small size thermo-treated aluminum alloy with symbiotic surround as in some Altecs, the phenolic cones as in the older RCA midranges or EV tweeters and few others… Thos types of cones are OK for lover MF but they are quite transient-challenged for higher frequencies. Those cones that I call “slow cones” are not so much depending from the electricity problems. In another side if you have larger cone, more ringy material and more ringy suspension (and with less damping) then you have much more transient capacity in the driver and the driver become much more  sensitive to any fluctuation of electricity quality.

With metal suspended S2 you are in a very deaneries zone. The S2 does not have the HF sterility of TADs drivers and hard suspension of the Altec 802s. The cone is large, and the metal suspension is very resonance-wobbly. The suspension does not damp the cone (as the S2 plastic sustention does) but rather let it to ring and even accelerate the ringing. So you are in very vulnerable mode with metal suspension and while you use it the electricity should be perfect and the quality of your signal should be also very high. The metal suspended S2 acts in a way like a true ribbon in his sensitively to electricity. The difference is that ribbon with bad electricity produce noise but the S2 with bad electricity produces very wild and very ugly resonances…

AI for instance can not handle the metal suspended S2 but it means a little as it is only in context of my electronics and in context of my highly urban electricity. Your mileage might vary and in a “clear” environment I presume that metal suspended S2 might be useable…

Still, in your case when the “HF were very snappy, excellent”, I being me, would blame not the better electricity but the simplistic, crude and not demanding jazz music…

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

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