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Townshend Maximum Supertweeters

Yes, Maximum. I don’t come up with the names, I just review the stuff, okay? ;) And I got em because everyone keeps telling me I should, and once again they are right. Whew! That was easy!

Kidding! We will now laboriously delve into why you cannot live without these tweeters, that you can’t even hear.

For sure I can’t. My hearing rolls off somewhere north of 15k. If that. These things extend to 90k. Why? What difference can it possibly make?

Who knows? And since when has that stopped me?

So out they come and what have we here? Two heavy black bricks, with a screen on the front and a couple binding posts on the back. In between the posts is a little knob you use to turn them off and set the levels. On the bottom are rudimentary rubber dimple feet. Guess I was expecting Pods or something, this being Townshend. No such luck.

They go on top of the Moabs. Well there is already a BDR Shelf on top, and a HFT dead center right where this thing is supposed to go. Moving HFT even an inch changes the sound so executive decision, the Maximum Supertweeters go just outboard of the HFT. They are first just placed there not even connected, just in case this somehow messes with the sound. It doesn’t.

Okay so now you need to know my system is all messed up. No, not the usual mess I mean really seriously messed up. No turntable. Chris Brady has the bearing for some resurfacing and stuff. So we are slumming with the heavily modded Oppo. Not to fear, Ted Denney sent me some of his latest Atmosphere X (review to come) which with the right tuning bullet the Oppo now sounds....digital. Oh well. KBO.

The usual: Demag. Warmup. Listen a while. Hook em up. What level? Who knows? Moabs are 98dB. How ya gonna know anyway? How can it even matter? How do you even set the level of something you can’t hear? Level 3, good as any. Plug em in. No change. Not the slightest peep out of these things. Total dud. Knew it. Sit back down.

What the...? No way. There is not the slightest hint of top end coming from these things. They may as well not be there at all. Except the whole presentation is somehow different. Top to bottom. No way!

I get up and turn the black magic off. Sit back down. Crap. Flat, grainy, digital. Turn em back on. Deep, liquid, analog.

No, not analog like my turntable. They are just supertweeters after all not magic. But way more analog than it was. More dimensional, more solid, more liquid detailed. More black between the notes, and in the black it is now easier to hear the natural acoustic decay. I do NOT want to go back to listening to CD without this! I cannot wait to hear it with my table.

And I haven’t even had time to get them dialed in yet!



millercarbon
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Thanks roxy54, I will be doing the same only suspended on a line from above. This will be a whole lot easier to isolate from vibration which is my ultimate goal once we find the best location.

stereo5, I am not into hearing tests because hearing is passive while listening is very much an intellectual activity. Babies and little kids have wonderful hearing, but we all know they are lousy listeners. This same pattern unfortunately can carry over well into adulthood. Oh well. Not in our cases, eh? My guesstimate is based on the XLO demagnetizing tracks one of which is a sweep tone to 20kHz. While the usual measurebators will protest at this I feel if you are going to do any sort of test at all it makes much more sense to be testing my ability to hear in my system and room, exactly what this does. Since I know the sweep goes to 20kHz and I know when it ends I can make a pretty good guess of what I can hear by when and how fast it fades away to nothing. Which it seems to do around 15kHz. But yeah could be even lower. 

In any case it is a crude measure at best. Did anyone read the pdf link above? Do people not find it fascinating there are far more ear cells devoted to transients we cannot hear than frequencies we can? Anyone? Beuller???
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Interesting observation, Ozzy. My previous Talon Khorus looked like a 3 way but they always told me no they are a two-way with a Supertweeter. Thought it was just marketing, bragging about their tweeter going higher. It was a metal dome, not ribbon, so I doubt it went up into the 90kHz region where the Townshend works, where the magic seems to happen. But now I wonder if maybe even though it didn't extend that high it did go high enough to get a little taste, and maybe that is one of the reasons I liked them so much?
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,979 posts
 
High frequencies in general are directional and more of them will tend to shrink soundstage FBOFW all else remaining the same.  That’s a fact. 
facten
2,973 posts
 
@ozzy, Can you provide some insights as to why you didn't get much benefit with the Focals vs your former speakers?
Thanks
pjb255livecom
30 posts
 
I only stream content, and I'm intrigued by the prospect of adding these, but I'm struggling to understand how these devices can produce any ultrasonic content when - correct me if I'm wrong - ultrasonic content is filtered out in the the A-to-D process. Am I missing something?
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