Presently Madisound has 8 options for ribbons under $100. The link I posted earlier for the horn loaded Fountek was only $70 each.
About the Focus. It depends what you are comparing it to. I drive an E39 BMW 528 with the sport pack as my daily driver and the focus is not that. I have a E30 325ic as a summer car which has been modded to hell and back. The handling and ride of the new small Fords is very stiff and compares quite favorably to the 325. Match a fun responsive drive feel with 40 mpg that can cary 4 people and their stuff and I have to say it is a good combo. Is a 5 series? No. It isn't intended to be. And for highway driving I would likely prefer the Malibu or the like, but I would never want to live one. Personally give me a manual transmission, a stiff suspension and a nice set of Vermonts best twisties and I am a happy man. Even if it is not straight line fast.
About the Focus. It depends what you are comparing it to. I drive an E39 BMW 528 with the sport pack as my daily driver and the focus is not that. I have a E30 325ic as a summer car which has been modded to hell and back. The handling and ride of the new small Fords is very stiff and compares quite favorably to the 325. Match a fun responsive drive feel with 40 mpg that can cary 4 people and their stuff and I have to say it is a good combo. Is a 5 series? No. It isn't intended to be. And for highway driving I would likely prefer the Malibu or the like, but I would never want to live one. Personally give me a manual transmission, a stiff suspension and a nice set of Vermonts best twisties and I am a happy man. Even if it is not straight line fast.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has some doubts about some of Zaph's measurements and conclusions.
Although I don't have a G3si I do have a G2 which is almost identical in design but shorter vertically, and his measurements are somewhat at odds with both the manufacturer and other 3rd party sources, as well as seeming a little suspicious when compared to extrapolated results from the G2.
His conclusions often aren't supported by his own measurements either. I would take what he says with a grain of salt.
I offered up a pair of Raven 1's to Zaph to test just after he posted the test. He was not interested. I will try to not read into why, but I got the impression he just doesn't like ribbons. To each their own, I say, but I think that by leaving out the high end ribbons it leads to the conclusion that all ribbons are high distortion. Likely the inverse result would be had if he had only measured cheap domes and a full range of ribbons. I don't know the man and appreciate the work he shares, but his rant about snake oil and boutique cables/caps makes me take the lot of his opinions with a grain of salt.
I know how difficult it can be to get US parts sent to Europe (and some dealers don't ship to Europe) but if you find anything you want let me know and I'll be happy to do a pick up and ship for you at cost. As they say, we gotta stick together in this life
Best regards and wishes, Mike.
Hi Mike (Seebert) many thanks for your kind help , i´ll let you know if i need anything , if you need anything shipped from Europe let me know.
my intention is not to steal this thread , indeed in almost all speakers i heard i always struggle with the tweeters , so my intention is to find the best tweeter for the best price , as i believe is the OP intention too.
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No, ribbons don't have narrow directivity so they wouldn't suit your subjective preference.
However objectively, i've get to see a dome or compression driver half as clean as this:
RAAL vs NRT Measurements,
The impulse, decay, FR, and yes, polar (not narrow but very smooth) are as good as it gets - especially given that the cabinet is a typical box with all the likely diffraction involved.
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Please don't take this the wrong way or as a criticism, just making a point that I've come to believe in over the years: a full set of (as an example) pre or power amplifier specs will not give anyone reading them a good indication of how the unit will perform in their own real world. I know specs form the basis of choice for a good designer to begin working from ... but from there on isn't it also that designer's opinion as to what does or does not sound 'right' that determines his/her final product. I always thought that specs were for the guidance of the wise and a starting point for a potentially successful design but they offer no guarantees of good 'real world' sound or suit a particular ear or musical taste. I'd guess that we all have opinions and personally I welcome hearing the opinions of others in order to add to and expand my own. Just my 2c worth ... and (not living in an anechoic chamber - more like the living room for acoustic hell) my 2c opinion
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I don't really know why 1" dome is so popular even in very expensive loudspeakers if it is so bad design from the start? Do you, Gedlee and others, think that dispersion or what is problem? Distortion in low end? Dynamic capability? Is small Sd limiting factor??
Small dome seems to be good at dispersion. If speaker has too much directivity in highs, I think sound lacks air.
Small dome seems to be good at dispersion. If speaker has too much directivity in highs, I think sound lacks air.
That's a bit of a sweeping statement. A large percentage of ribbons use a wave-guide to increase sensitivity and by necessity that will narrow the directivity. (Which I personally think is a good thing)
In the horizontal plane the ribbon is narrow so directivity will be whatever the wave-guide dictates, and will vary greatly from one model to another due to differences in the size, shape and design of the wave-guide...
In the vertical plane the directivity is largely controlled by the length of the ribbon although the wave-guide does still control the directivity at the bottom end.
In the horizontal plane there is just as much configurability of the directivity and polar response as there is with any waveguide driver.
That forum won't allow downloading of the attachment without registering.
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I've previously measured the polar response of the Aurum Cantus G2. Until the recent neodymium price hike they were selling for around $140US which is middle of the road pricing for a ribbon. (There are many twice the price or more even in the same size range, let alone larger ones) I think they sound very good, but that's just my opinion, and I haven't heard any of the "high end" ribbons.
I took both horizontal and vertical measurements out to 90 degrees in 5 degree steps using ARTA. There is one major caveat with my measurements though - they were taken with the tweeter unbaffled, suspended in space.
Because of this there is a 2dB on-axis dip in the frequency response around 6Khz due to diffraction off the sides of the 110mm round face plate which goes away beyond about 15 degrees on the horizontal axis. Because the directivity sonogram is normalized to the on-axis response this makes the the directivity appear to "bloom" at this frequency, but I believe this to be an artefact of the on-axis dip that would not be present on a proper baffle.
I really need to re-measure it on a large IEC sized baffle but that will have wait until I a have the room and materials to do so...so take it for what its worth.
Horizontally it stays between about 100-120 degrees from about 2.5Khz to 10Khz, ignoring the spurious bloom at 6Khz. Interestingly despite the wave-guide being only about 25mm deep and 30mm wide at the front it maintains horizontal directivity down to about 2.5Khz before the pattern collapses below 2Khz. Vertically directivity is the same below 3Khz, but progressively narrows higher than that due to the length of the ribbon, down to about 50 degrees at 10Khz.
I haven't seen any polar responses published online for other ribbons, so I don't know how this compares to other models.
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I, of coarse, strongly disagree with this. Measurements tell the whole story when you know what to measure and how to interpret them. Having been involved with a myriad of subjective tests, I also know how unreliable subjective assements are. I do (almost) nothing "by ear", everything is based on measurements. My customers and I are happy with that approach.
Several problems with small domes that are inherent in the design.
1) non-controlled directivity going from wide to narrow within their passband
2) low efficiency which means that they will suffer from thermal modulation (dynamics)
3) inability to ever achieve high SPLs without serious overloading (distortion)
4) inability of the crossover to go down below 1 kHz. Crossovers above 1 kHz are a very bad idea.
I can't live with any one of these three, but all of them together is a disaster.
Simon
Thanks for those. Not really very appealing.
Any chance that I could get the raw data so that I could plot it as well.
I just don;t have a good feeling about the ARTA polar maps.
What do you find unappealing ? I think you might be expecting a bit much if you're comparing them to large format wave-guides such as those on a Summa whose throat is several times larger than this entire tweeter...
They're about the same size as a typical large face-plate dome tweeter, so should be judged against those. So the question is, is the directivity control significantly better than a dome tweeter ? I think so, especially below 4Khz where a dome lacks any control.
Raw data is 38MB worth of ARTA .pir files, maybe half that size zipped. Too big for the forum but I could email them perhaps. Because of the edge diffraction in the measurement I'm not too happy with their accuracy, however if you want a look that's fine.
My polar maps, or the way ARTA generates them ? Can you export ARTA pir files to your software and generate them there ?
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