Metal, kevlar, carbon, ceramic, hard composite etc mid and midbass drivers tend to have severe break up modes where the ear is most sensitive. (~3khz-5khz)
Then they require complex sharp slope crossovers to try and deal with their heavy break up modes. Which makes their problems...well... to keep it country simple..almost worse.
To simplify or conclude without getting into the complexities of trying to design with these drivers....IMO and IME...I don’t think they are worth the bother and find them to sound far worse than the solutions they propose to provide.
I’m talking about spending 20 years trying to find a single acceptable one among all of them. Just one. That..this is not a casual ill thought out comment.
I think that the inharmonic distortions that they produce in the highest sensitivity range of the ear..that people mistake these distortions as detail.
Where instead of learning past first impressions... of what detail in reproduced music actually is, they press the simple button and gain insight where none is possible. A falsified learning shortcut. (first answer found syndrome) This is common, due to how the mind works when it is questing/learning/etc.
An example of that... is how the Yamaha ns-10, a horribly distorting speaker, is prevalent in budget studios, as the distortions can reveal things to the mixer of the audio signal. They mix the music based on perceiving distortions in the critical hearing ranges.
Companies can only sell the people what the people are buying... so the the market in the high end, moved into these distorting mid bass composite and hard cone drivers.
It is this sort of thing that has helped a lot of the high end audio world march slowly but surely into low dynamic rang incoherent distorted screech that has been masquerading as ’revealed detail’.
And that is why you don’t see me and many others in these rooms with $500k systems (pick a $ number) in some rooms at shows, yet you see other people in those rooms in rapt attention, digging the sound of these whole signal chains. Awesome sound they say...
and others say, ’it’s the most grotesque distorted thing they’ve heard at the show so far’....
It’s a big mental divide.
