Let's talk Tweeters!

I have discovered something:

The very best tweeter to reproduce a Kazoo is an AMT.

That is all.


E

The following isn’t a claim about some objective technical truth; it’s only my subjective assessment:

The best tweeter I’ve ever experienced (or my favorite) is the MBL (omni) tweeters. I remember the first time I encountered the MBL at a CES show many years ago. For every speaker that touted it’s exotic or expensive tweeter, I often ended up hearing the tweeter "look at me!"
Ribbons, domes hard and soft, whatever, some gained clarity and air and verisimilitude over others, but especially with drum cymbal there was always a sense of those sounds being reproduced by a tweeter.

One of the constant disappointments in hi fi reproduction of upper frequencies is how small and thin high frequency instruments become relative to real life - no matter how vivid they are through the system. You just have to tap a drum stick against a ride cymbal to see just how BIG and round that sound is, compared to the squeezed down version that comes out of most hi-fi rigs.  

Then I entered the MBL room and literally for the first time ever I heard drum cymbals sounding like they did in real life - big, rich, round, clean, timbrally bang on...it just didn’t sound like tweeters or mechanical reproduction, it just sounded like drum cymbals. To my ears it put every other speaker’s attempts at natural high frequencies to shame. (I know Jonathan Valin of TAS has made similar comments). This impression of the MBL upper frequencies has remained fairly constant over the years. And now having owned the smaller MBL 121 stand mounted speakers, with their omni mids and tweeters, the impression remains. I’ve never heard life like detail reproduced more effortlessly and naturally. (I also own other speakers, e.g Thiel 3.7s, Waveform, Hales, and have had many other speakers and none I’ve heard at my place, stores or shows do it better.
That said, I heard a demo of the Raidho small monitors that with vocals was mindblowing, and which suggested the MBLs were coming in for some competition in the high frequencies).

@prof


I’m glad you found a commercial speaker brand you like, but I need this thread to avoid devolving into brand flame wars. To avoid this in the future please:

• Stay focused on tweeters and their manufacturers (when known)
  
• Discuss the technology, materials, construction, and trade-offs
• Discuss comparisons to other similar and dissimilar tweeters
  

I really wanted to focus this thread on the tweeter drivers, their technology and trade offs. I really wanted to avoid discussing specific consumer speaker brands. I certainly did not mean to start a discussion about entire commercial speaker from top to bottom.

It would be interesting to know if anyone else has heard an omni tweeter they felt delivered outstanding dynamics and realism.

Best,

E

I have to echo Duke’s response. I get why you don’t want to mention brands, but it seems to really limit the applicability of the discussion.
MBL makes a very specific type of tweeter as far as I know not found elsewhere, and I have no idea if other manufacturers have produced an omni tweeter design with similarly excellent results. So I can’t say "I like omni tweeters because they have X results" because maybe I don’t like all omni tweeters - I can only speak to the specific ones I’ve heard that sound great. And pointing the the specific brand allows others to know exactly what I’m talking about.

And this really speaks to the whole issue of discussing tweeters in the absence of specific designs and implementations: We all know drivers don’t have qualities that exist in a vacuum - it depends on implementation. I’ve heard ribbon tweeters sound awful, and sound great, depending on how, technically, a specific speaker designer is using it.

How do I discuss the qualities of metal dome tweeters without mentioning the differences in implementation? Way back when metal dome tweeters were becoming more in use I used to agree with many audiophiles that metal dome tweeters sounded hot and metallic. But that prejudice was vanquished when I encountered the way Paul Hales had employed them in his speakers (Transcendence line), which seemed to have all the benefits of the metal drivers without the purported draw backs and characteristics (they were remarkably smooth, rich, sweet sounding speakers - still are, as I still have some).   Now, if someone cares to, they can look into how Hales implemented those tweeters (looking for instance at stereophile's measurements, etc).