Highly rigid and light but poor internal damping.
Personally I don’t like the splashy sound of drivers of this type design (metal and highly rigid). They have great bandwidth that makes for impressive measured performance but I find the sound is "splashy" due to the way rigid materials vibrate naturally (like a bell vibrates and rings after an initial hit but a damped material like a pillow does not).
Splashy is a good term - as in when you splash the water it makes a lot of sound after the initial splash. Acoustically this means the driver imparts its own sound to the timbre whereas an internally damped cone material is much more inert - contributing much less coloration after the sound stops.
I prefer damped designs even though they tend to have a narrower bandwidth and can suffer from breakup and therefore require more careful design and larger more expensive drive motors. Damped cones sound much more natural and faithful to the original tone/timbre of recorded instruments even if they are not as linear on a speaker frequency plot.
Here is an example of a titanium tweeter - look at the ringing in the waterfall plot in the treble !!!
https://www.stereophile.com/content/jmlab-utopia-loudspeaker-measurements-part-2
Here is an example of Be - similar problem in the treble but very much better than titanium
https://www.stereophile.com/content/focal-maestro-utopia-iii-loudspeaker-measurements
Personally I don’t like the splashy sound of drivers of this type design (metal and highly rigid). They have great bandwidth that makes for impressive measured performance but I find the sound is "splashy" due to the way rigid materials vibrate naturally (like a bell vibrates and rings after an initial hit but a damped material like a pillow does not).
Splashy is a good term - as in when you splash the water it makes a lot of sound after the initial splash. Acoustically this means the driver imparts its own sound to the timbre whereas an internally damped cone material is much more inert - contributing much less coloration after the sound stops.
I prefer damped designs even though they tend to have a narrower bandwidth and can suffer from breakup and therefore require more careful design and larger more expensive drive motors. Damped cones sound much more natural and faithful to the original tone/timbre of recorded instruments even if they are not as linear on a speaker frequency plot.
Here is an example of a titanium tweeter - look at the ringing in the waterfall plot in the treble !!!
https://www.stereophile.com/content/jmlab-utopia-loudspeaker-measurements-part-2
Here is an example of Be - similar problem in the treble but very much better than titanium
https://www.stereophile.com/content/focal-maestro-utopia-iii-loudspeaker-measurements