Speaker 101 - tweeter and cone materials

There are good and bad sounding speakers using all sorts of cone material.
More important is cone suspension/surrounds.
Most modern speakers use quite thick rubber surrounds which allows for long cone excursion, which allows them to produce lots of low bass.Unfortunately it also produces a slow smeared sort of sound.This is why most modern mainstream speakers sound so bad and why so many hardenned audiophiles end up using things like Fostex,Lowther and Zu speakers that have cloth surrounds and short excursions.
Anyone who dosn't believe that modern cone surrounds are wrong needs to listen to a pair of old Goodmans Axiom 80s that have no surrounds!

JT

All your inputs are so interesting and educational. Keep them coming!

So who uses the Seas?

Jtgofish,

Good point about thick surrounds and long cone excursion....there is a lot of non linear distortion that occurs at the cone to surround interface as the rubber roll decouples from the cone - often causing a sharp change in response at higher excursions. This problem usually occurs in a range between 500 and 1000 Hz and is therefore of greatest issue in two way systems which necessarily cover that range with a single driver. Sometimes a careful manufacturer may use an intermediate material between the rubber and the cone, sometimes a damped cloth surround is used with the benefit of overall reduced coupling and smoother response. Nevertheless, more often than not, most two way systems inherently have this problem in the all important mid range...