As it turns out, it may have nothing or very little to do with tweeter design or construction material at all, in my case. Recently, I bought a pair of Monitor Audio S8's and had a tweeter failure in one (open circuit). It took me an hour or so to pin down the reason that the sound was unbalanced and sounded so generally bad.
Because it will be at least 3 weeks to get the tweeter replacement, and even though there is a significant loss of quality, I decided to remove the tweeter from the other speaker because listening with one tweeter out was very fatiguing and annoying. The resulting sound quality was, of course, bad, having lost detail and timbre.
Now, the rest of the news; even in the absence of tweeters, the sounds that caused me discomfort because of what I call shrillness, were pretty much still there so the tweeters, in my case at least, are not the culprits. To test this I used the CD "jazz at the Pawnshop" which has a pretty good range of frequencies and sharp volume rises. With no tweeters, this music lost its personality but retained harshness in those areas that bothered me with the tweeters in place. So.....where do I go from here? BTW, the upstream equipment is Shanling Digital CD player, CAL Sigma DAC and Rogue Audio 100 WPC hybrid amp.
Because it will be at least 3 weeks to get the tweeter replacement, and even though there is a significant loss of quality, I decided to remove the tweeter from the other speaker because listening with one tweeter out was very fatiguing and annoying. The resulting sound quality was, of course, bad, having lost detail and timbre.
Now, the rest of the news; even in the absence of tweeters, the sounds that caused me discomfort because of what I call shrillness, were pretty much still there so the tweeters, in my case at least, are not the culprits. To test this I used the CD "jazz at the Pawnshop" which has a pretty good range of frequencies and sharp volume rises. With no tweeters, this music lost its personality but retained harshness in those areas that bothered me with the tweeters in place. So.....where do I go from here? BTW, the upstream equipment is Shanling Digital CD player, CAL Sigma DAC and Rogue Audio 100 WPC hybrid amp.