Thank you for the compliment. That is my specialty, and my pleasure, ever since having my eyes opened to a lot of crazy things myself. So nice to know it is appreciated, and you are very welcome.
How important the range is, I would guess depends a lot on the listener. We are really good at localizing midrange and treble. But somewhere up around this frequency range that ability starts fading away. Same thing at the low end, where we start to lose the ability to localize below around 80Hz. So I would think the person who can hear test tones really well all the way out to 20k, for them it may be they need to be either crossed over higher or it would be important for that person that they be closely aligned with the tweeter.
There is evidence for this in that some people have said it is a huge improvement to have the supertweeter very close to the tweeter. While mine are several feet away, and others actually have them pointing backwards or in multiple directions. This would totally be a problem with a normal range tweeter but with supertweeters seems to be different with different people.
Yes a volume control is a must. This is because speakers vary widely in sensitivity. My Moabs at 98dB require quite a bit higher setting to be at the same relative volume as a speaker with only 88dB sensitivity. There are speakers both above 98 and below 88. So for sure the level must be adjustable.
At the same time it is not super critical. I can run mine just about equally well at two different levels that are, I think, 2dB apart. A difference of 2dB would be a big deal with a tweeter or midrange. In this case it is very hard to tell. My hunch is the more the supertweeter overlaps the tweeter and the more extended your hearing is the more this will matter. Just a hunch.
There’s a few have said the Townshend Supertweeter is quite a bit better than some cheaper ones they tried. But there’s also one or two changed speakers and they noticed less difference. So it is entirely possible your neodymium magnet ribbon thing is close enough you might not find it worth the extra. Based on my experience this is kind of a guess not knowing your ribbon thing exactly but I did notice a pretty darn nice improvement adding just one more sub- and that was going from 4 to 5, which is supposed to be less than 3 to 4. So if you’re asking advice that to me is the safer bet, and I am a low hanging fruit kind of guy.
How important the range is, I would guess depends a lot on the listener. We are really good at localizing midrange and treble. But somewhere up around this frequency range that ability starts fading away. Same thing at the low end, where we start to lose the ability to localize below around 80Hz. So I would think the person who can hear test tones really well all the way out to 20k, for them it may be they need to be either crossed over higher or it would be important for that person that they be closely aligned with the tweeter.
There is evidence for this in that some people have said it is a huge improvement to have the supertweeter very close to the tweeter. While mine are several feet away, and others actually have them pointing backwards or in multiple directions. This would totally be a problem with a normal range tweeter but with supertweeters seems to be different with different people.
Yes a volume control is a must. This is because speakers vary widely in sensitivity. My Moabs at 98dB require quite a bit higher setting to be at the same relative volume as a speaker with only 88dB sensitivity. There are speakers both above 98 and below 88. So for sure the level must be adjustable.
At the same time it is not super critical. I can run mine just about equally well at two different levels that are, I think, 2dB apart. A difference of 2dB would be a big deal with a tweeter or midrange. In this case it is very hard to tell. My hunch is the more the supertweeter overlaps the tweeter and the more extended your hearing is the more this will matter. Just a hunch.
There’s a few have said the Townshend Supertweeter is quite a bit better than some cheaper ones they tried. But there’s also one or two changed speakers and they noticed less difference. So it is entirely possible your neodymium magnet ribbon thing is close enough you might not find it worth the extra. Based on my experience this is kind of a guess not knowing your ribbon thing exactly but I did notice a pretty darn nice improvement adding just one more sub- and that was going from 4 to 5, which is supposed to be less than 3 to 4. So if you’re asking advice that to me is the safer bet, and I am a low hanging fruit kind of guy.