soft dome versus hard dome tweeters

I want to repeat myself a little though. Tweeters don’t matter. They are the sprinkles on top of the doughnut.

Midranges matter.

I’m saying this a little funny, tongue in cheek, but honestly we pay far too much attention to a device that may not even be working in some speakers, and we overspend based on the tweeter.

The midrange is where it’s at. In this respect ATC speakers have the right approach. I’ve never heard them BTW, so I don’t mean to push them, but the balance of manufacturing costs in them is better than a lot of other speakers.

Curious fingers are incompatible with hard dome tweeters.

I want to repeat myself a little though. Tweeters don’t matter. They are the sprinkles on top of the doughnut.

Midranges matter.

I’m saying this a little funny, tongue in cheek, but honestly we pay far too much attention to a device that may not even be working in some speakers, and we overspend based on the tweeter.

Over here in Tannoy land, tweeters extend far into the midrange - crossovers are typically ~ 2kHz (tuplip DC) or 1.1 kHz (pepperpot DC, with compression driver tweet). Fyne, in their continuation of the DC design, has pushed crossovers even lower on some models, as low as 900 Hz (!!).

Now the supertweeters (crossover varies from 14kHz - 22kHz) - those are definitely "just" the sprinkles on top, but they certainly have output into audible range, and you can hear their effect at your listening position. So I imagine a 4kHz crossover tweeter is crucially important to midrange, still.

About beryllium domes - perhaps their durability / brittleness is a limiting factor for alternate implementations? We’ve only seen them used as direct radiating domes. Perhaps they cannot withstand the forces in a horn / compression chamber? The Focal Utopia headphones are interesting becasue there have *definitely* been higher reports of driver failures with that model, versus other headphones. This is an application where the beryllium dome is asked to produce full-spectrum frequencies, 20Hz and up. In fact, with a vinyl source, you could send some very large-amplitude subsonics; I always wondered if that was a high risk factor.

I just went from an speaker with all aluminum drivers (KEF) to one with all nonmetal drivers (Sonus Farber Amati G5) and the difference is huge and all in a good way.

This question is exactly why the recent controversy about measurements matters so much! The goal of the speaker designer is a flat anechoic response and then they shape to taste from there (with the crossover, not necessarily the drivers). Most modern tweeters are capable of producing the same frequency response regardless of the material used. The reason metal domes are used is because the tend to stay pistonic within a given frequency range allowing the designer to create steeper crossover slopes that match the midrange slope without any dips in the response or introducing distortion or beeming. Any tweeter can be ‘padded’ to reduce its output at a given frequency which to our ears will be interpreted as a ‘softer’ sound. A fabric dome can be boosted in these same regions to sound more sharp/edgy. All this happens in the crossover, not the tweeter driver material. With all that said, metal domes can offer greater detail retrieval because they don’t break up as quickly (staying pistonic longer) as fabric. IMO, most give too much credit for a speakers sound characteristic to the drivers and not enough to the crossover which btw is what the other posters mean when they say ‘implementation’.