Where do most perceived detail come from, tweeter or woofer?

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@GM

Have looked at the 'Interactive Frequency Chart' which shows the frequency ranges of various instruments and find it to be in accord with my earlier post on the topic.

What I can't find is the evidence to support your assertion that the most perceived detail is in the 6 to 10kHz bandwidth. What am I missing?
 
This won't help your question much but I (like Cask05) have a 2-way at home. I/we also use an active crossover.

I don't recall the crossover point, it's say....around 380Hz if I recall.

Using the active, you can defeat/mute either half of the speaker or the entire speaker by the push of a button.

Doing that, I found out that the treble horn sounds very tinny and the bass bin sounds very boomy/muddy (which being a horn, it is not)

Click again and blend them together and it's amazing that they can put two very disparate sounds together and they come out sounding like magic.

More than 10 years later, I still do that mute once in a blue moon just to remind myself how much each half sucks on its own but together..... wow.
 
Bang for Buck, have a look at second hand B&W 602s3. They are a really good buy second hand. Personally I found the mid-range a bit lacking so eventually sold mine and bought B&W 683s1. If you can get those second hand they are really good and well priced.

The 683's adopted the midrange from the infamous £32K Nautilus - it is stunning for the money.
 
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Since you mentioned it, I almost bought the B&W 685 S2 a few days ago. Not many used B&Ws here, I see a 601 and a 682 S2 and price wise I would rather buy new ones.

I am still considering the 685 S2, but I thought the bass is kinda loose and the sizzle kinda unnatural. At the moment the new Elac debut 2.0 and DIY alternatives are looking better for me.
 
frugal-phile™
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I don't recall the crossover point, it's say....around 380Hz if I recall.

That would make it a WAW as opposed to a more typical 2-way. That approach has some significant advantages.

The 2 best speakers we have done cross a bit lower, one 250-300 Hz and the other — which has a wide baffle — just under 200 Hz.

Keeping the XO this low removes many of the typical issues with XOs, and make possible both lots of overlap allowing a 1st order XO and allows for keeping the centre-to-centre driver distances under the critical quarter wavelength distance, so the drivers are essentially coincident. The combination of 1st order XOs and coincident drivers means most of the phase/timing issues that come along with multiple drivers just go away. The envelopes of the waveforms are all kept in tact and the ear/brain has less work to do listening to the music.

dave
 
I would give it a good go at working given the opportunity !
I think it's a noble gesture to think an inexpensive "component" somehow turns out to be a "giant" killer. The idea romantic and comforting but real life is real life and at the end, it's how much money something costs. The more expensive something is most likely it is something good. It's like the law of physics although it may not be obvious. We all heard of entropy but in real life we can think of it as a byproduct whether we like it or not. For example, let’s say you just finished building a pair of speakers and spend a day on designing the xover. After a day of listening, you declare it’s finished, it’s the best and you decide to release your speaker. Since I don’t know you but it’s likely that if only after a day of listening, it probably was not really optimized. But say if you decide to listen for a few weeks and fine tune the xover, then mostly likely it will be better than just having listen to only one day. So during those few weeks, you probably expend a lot of energy, or entropy, not to mention a few glasses of vodka, burgers … and those cost money. So if you were to sell your speakers, it will cost a lot more money as opposed to the one that only took you one day.
I mean I’ve read a lot of people proclaiming some inexpensive drivers somehow can beat something that costs a lot more but common sense saying something totally different. There is only one Kate but a lot more tate.
 
@GM

What I can't find is the evidence to support your assertion that the most perceived detail is in the 6 to 10kHz bandwidth. What am I missing?

Well, it's not called 'definition' for nothing ;) Regardless, the OP asked a very specific question, so got a very specific answer, but long experience has taught me that when folks talk about how 'detailed', etc., a speaker is, invariably there's some peaking in the 6 to 10 kHz BW, often just a major peak around 7-8 kHz.

Doesn't matter if it's a 'FR' driver or a multi-way or how good/bad the rest of the speaker's BW is IME, we are very sensitive to sibilance and in small amounts can 'highlight'/bring sounds 'forward' a bit and of course if too much, then too distorted for comfort.

GM
 
@ andy2

If a product's too cheap in the world of high end Hi-Fi then the punters simply won't buy it!

Purchases have often got more to do with perceived value than true worth.

P.S. Entropy is a gradual decay into disorder. Sounds like my life, aided no doubt by all those vodkas and burgers you mentioned!
 
Well, it's not called 'definition' for nothing ;) Regardless, the OP asked a very specific question, so got a very specific answer, but long experience has taught me that when folks talk about how 'detailed', etc., a speaker is, invariably there's some peaking in the 6 to 10 kHz BW, often just a major peak around 7-8 kHz.

Doesn't matter if it's a 'FR' driver or a multi-way or how good/bad the rest of the speaker's BW is IME, we are very sensitive to sibilance and in small amounts can 'highlight'/bring sounds 'forward' a bit and of course if too much, then too distorted for comfort.

GM

I think the that frequency region is like sharpening effect in digital image processing.

If we take a photo of a face that is slightly blurry. If we apply sharpening the edges can look more defined. This is like turning up the said frequencies on a bad speaker. Like you said this can be described as "detailed", or "sharp", depending on the amount and preference.

But micro detail or "texture" is something else. If we zoomed into the sharpened blurry face, in place of the fine hair and pores we would simply find grainy pixels. This would be akin to distortion.

If we want micro details or texture, this is not something we can EQ, this would require a fast and well damped driver, which often means powerful magnet and expensive.

So it depends on what we mean by "detail". Those 2 are different things, but they work in conjunction is practice and not so easy to separate IMHO. hence my question. :)
 
That's quite low, what is the tweeter (more like a wideband) driver?

Just looked it up.

Bass bin (and as stated by someone else, is a folded horn) is crossed at 450 Hz (LR-24) and the tweeter (TAD-4002) is crossed at 400Hz (LR-24)

I knew I had seen 380...so kept looking...

Turns out it's on the original driver (Klipsch K69) where they cross the same bass bin at 450Hz and the tweeter at 380Hz (both LR-24)

2" throat and if memory serves me, 4" diaphragms.
 
@scottjoplin

The initial question was based on an impression rather than on a fact, so it's not surprising that the ensuing discussions have proceeded mainly in the same vein.

Terms like 'detail', 'texture' and 'fast' have been used. These are qualitative terms which possibly defy definition.

I, for one, would favour a more quantitative approach where contributions are backed up by hard fact.

At the risk of proving that I may be unable to put my money where my mouth is, I will attempt to define the term 'fast' as follows: A 'fast' loudspeaker is one which has a good transient response (see my earlier post).

I almost guarantee there's a quadrillion alternative definitions out there!
 
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Yeah...but pick a frequency... say 500. Doesn't it have a specific length?

If so, isn't any driver that reproduces that 500 Hz just as "fast" as another doing the same thing?

I'm with Galu... it's the attack time that (I'm guessing) helps differentiate the two different presentations of the same frequency??

Perhaps this is why I'm a fan of horns...?
 
(see my earlier post).
Yes, your post #33 (if it's still there) sums it up very nicely, transient response is the key to how the speaker is able to accurately follow the signal which by it's nature will reveal the detail and could be called speed (fastness). The advantage of transient response as a measure is that it includes the frequency response and phase response of the system as a whole.
 
Quite honestly, Galu, the more stupid the topic, the more replies it attracts. There are people who believe that fitting a $100 resistor, rather than a $1 wirewound, to their tweeter transforms it. I mean, really, don't people know that tweeters are a glorified wirewound resistor too.

The deep and interesting stuff disappears into oblivion very rapidly... :eek:

Anyhoo. Here's a fascinating exploration by Troels Gravesen into a very retro Philips Fullrange. Now don't try it as a serious fullrange. It will let you down. But it does an awful lot right in terms of micro-detail.

Philips 9710/

The classic old Peerless cone tweeters might be criticised for horizontal alignment too, but I get it. It's about matching efficiency.
 

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