How can Wilson Audio speakers sound that good if they are using OEM drivers?


How can Wilson Speaker sound that good if they are using OEM drivers made of last century materials? B&W used Kevlar and now Continuum, after a lot of R&D. Magico uses Graphane which is the new Carbon Fiber. 
Would a Wilson Speaker sound better if somehow one could put a B&W midrange Continuum driver instead of the OEM paper driver they use?
128x128gonzalo_oxenford
Seems to me Wilson uses a number of drivers made by MISCO of Minneapolis. They often make custom drivers and have been in business for decades. Experience working with materials is worth something; its often all about execution!
I only have a brief comment to make here, but one i feel future speaker buyers might want to consider.  Foam surrounds do not seem to survive well in wet, sticky climates (like Florida for instance). Apparently they can still be found in some expensive products, as I can attest to from personal experience.  I was able to replace the speakers with identical designs but now the manufacturer substituted rubber surrounds.  I believe some of the Watt/Puppies way back when also used foam and had to be repaired or replaced after a few years.  
FF

That used to be the case, nowadays the foam surrounds should have been treated with "moldcide" which will prolong the life of them.  Its mold that cause them to deteriorate.  Further more the ones on the 4" ScanSpeak driver in discussion is coated on the front side.  The advantage of a foam surround compared to a rubber one is that it does not get "stiffer" as frequency increases which is one reason its being used on this particular driver   

Rubber surrounds too do deteriorate the process however takes longer.

Good Listening

Peter
Materials matter, but are meaningless if improperly implemented. The hugely popular B&W Kevlar mid-range looks fancy and because of their marketing they have sold many of them, however these drivers are far from pistonic in operation. Kevlar alone is ironically one of the worst materials to make a midrange driver out of, as it has a significantly lower modulus of elasticity (in single digit GPa depending on the composite layout) than aluminum (about 70GPa). Kevlar is also pretty heavy in comparison to paper, much less aluminum and PP, and therefore puts a lot of extra force on itself when moving at the incredibly high acceleration a midrage driver undergoes.

So in fact, the "last century" material of paper outdoes the "high tech" Kevlar in both stiffness and lightness. So why does B&W use it? If I had to guess, it's because Kevlar is very strong. I have seen Klippel scans of B&W's Kevlar driver, and they clearly operate almost entirely in breakup (aka non-pistonic). However the high strength of Kevlar keeps the cone together and allows it to take more of a beating (more force, more wattage). Unfortunately, operating in breakup introduces a lot of distortion.

Magico's drivers on the other hand are actually well designed with fancy materials, but they have had to put a lot of effort into developing these designs. The real reason why you don't see more "fancy materials" in these high end speakers is because it's incredibly hard to simulate anisotripic material behavior. So either you spend millions on empirical testing (arbitrarily designing a driver, measuring it, then making a slightly different driver and testing it then comparing the difference), or you find someone who has developed software or has experience in the behavior of anisotropic materials. And even with all that, Wilson and Vandersteen speakers are still competing in the same realm as Magico. So is all that R&D worth it?

Also @johnk , carbon nanotubes are only dangerous if inhaled, they are inert in Magico's application. The same danger is present in Beryllium, as is toxic when inhaled in powdered form but inert when in a solid dome. Additionally, plywood actually is superior to MDF when implemented correctly, as it is stronger and stiffer. However, it is anisotropic, so it is tougher to design with and requires more expensive manufacturing techniques. As you can see there is a common theme here. The reason why so many manufactures use these "old" materials is because they are generally isotropic, and therefore are significantly easier to design with. When your material has relatively constant properties in all directions, your only variable is geometry. 

Also die casting refers to the use of a permanent mold, not to the quality of product being produced. Die casts are used as opposed to green sand or investment ceramic molds because they are reusable and highly repeatable. That's why both speaker designers and Hot Wheels would use this method to produce metal parts.

There is also the whole thing of defining "good sound" and whether or not certain materials actually produce "good sound" or whether we perceive them to sound pleasurable. But that is an endless can of worms that we should save for another discussion. 
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