Unfortunately, there’s a huge misnomer that driver material is the Biggest problem with speakers. While the material can interject it’s own inherent characteristics into the sound, it’s the crossover that dictates what those elements will do or don’t do and when people hear something they don’t like, the driver material is generally the easiest and first thing to get blamed.
The cabinet/environment that those drivers are put in will affect things as well, but a lot of it circles around the crossover and just because someone uses a really expensive fantastic material for a driver when designing a speaker doesn’t always mean they knew what they were doing with it. Best example of that is Bowers using Kevlar. When the patent ran out, you could find Kevlar on $399 Sounbars at Walmart, but the Kevlar didn’t make those Soundbars sound like speakers worth a thousand dollars. They used a cool material that had no bearing on that product’s performance. Bowers had been using Kevlar for twenty years before anyone else. Then there’s budget. What’s the target price point for the design? That influences a lot as well. So, in the end, driver material doesn’t play the biggest role in the sound of a speaker and that’s what I wanted to get across here.
Thanks.
The cabinet/environment that those drivers are put in will affect things as well, but a lot of it circles around the crossover and just because someone uses a really expensive fantastic material for a driver when designing a speaker doesn’t always mean they knew what they were doing with it. Best example of that is Bowers using Kevlar. When the patent ran out, you could find Kevlar on $399 Sounbars at Walmart, but the Kevlar didn’t make those Soundbars sound like speakers worth a thousand dollars. They used a cool material that had no bearing on that product’s performance. Bowers had been using Kevlar for twenty years before anyone else. Then there’s budget. What’s the target price point for the design? That influences a lot as well. So, in the end, driver material doesn’t play the biggest role in the sound of a speaker and that’s what I wanted to get across here.
Thanks.