Silk vs Titanium, Infinity vs JBL

[richie00boy]

I have the choice of Infinity or JBL 4 inch speakers for my dashboard to complement the 6.5 inch door mounted woofers and 12 inch boot mounted sub-woofer. The Infinity has silk tweeter whereas the JBL has titanium. Other than that the published specs look very similar.

From what I can gather JBL and Infinity seems to be all the same stuff - same parent company? So is there really any difference between them? They seem to be competing for the same level so I can't understand why they have two brands.

[ocaukrell]

As much as I love jbl's, I would have to swing to the infinitys due to the silk dome.

Never heard anything good about the jbl ti series.
Actually I've never heard a jbl car speaker I like.

Always prefered the smoother textile domes to hard metals.
But that is just my preference.

[Iron-Wizard]

JBL was an nice company and so was Infinity, i remember them from way back when they were smaller companies and really cared about the customer and dealers, now there gaints and dont care about anything apart from there share value.

I know the modern infinity tweeter sound glassy and narrow, the JBL just beat them by being smoother with more focused, i would say the JBL is just ahead of the inifinity.

I prefer Silk dome tweeters but just because it they say its silk does not make it so, it can have like 12% silk and thats not silk to me when the rest is nylon or some other synthetic material.

Why do you not just use a fuly blow treble unit in your dash board and not mess with a small 4 inch? you know it wont have a smooth frequency response and low power handling.

[richie00boy]

I'm of the school of thought that the tweeter should be not too far away from the mid, even coaxially mounted if possible. This keeps the sound stage better focused and more realistic IMO.

[Iron-Wizard]

Your a Kef man i think as long as the distance from the tweeter and the mids are similar then its not a problem, i think its called time/direction alingment?

I use an inverted array of 4 tweeters in my car to give me a pillar of HF sound on each side of my ears, it works well.

[dodgerblue]

id forget the 4 inch coax idea and put the dayton rs28 tweeter in there! the face is 4 inch anyway and you can cross it over around 2k to mesh if needed, a typical 4 inch will limit you in power handling and the drivers themselves will be sub-par-it all depends on what kind of system you are building and what your listening tasts are

[Iron-Wizard]

This is true, you wont any nice quality car audio in this size, which is why i would recommend a nice tweeter that can be crossed over very low.

The dynamics will be much better than a coxial type woofer typically.

[richie00boy]

Originally posted by Iron-Wizard
Your a Kef man i think as long as the distance from the tweeter and the mids are similar then its not a problem, i think its called time/direction alingment?

I use an inverted array of 4 tweeters in my car to give me a pillar of HF sound on each side of my ears, it works well.

Yes having the drivers equal distances from your ears is time alignment, but I beliveve they should also be close to each other to give point source operation. Even with time aligning, if they are separated too much the staging is all wrong IMO and makes the time aligning a waste of effort.

Originally posted by dodgerblue
id forget the 4 inch coax idea and put the dayton rs28 tweeter in there! the face is 4 inch anyway and you can cross it over around 2k to mesh if needed, a typical 4 inch will limit you in power handling and the drivers themselves will be sub-par-it all depends on what kind of system you are building and what your listening tasts are

I'm in the UK, never seen Dayton stuff here. Where do you get it?

[Iron-Wizard]

Your right Richie but a car is such a small space and the off axis response should blend the sounds waves as one and give a nice wide sound stage, some times in stereo the sound can be to choppy and one sided.

Give it a try and find out which one you like best, trial and error is a great tool.

[dodgerblue]

you can check out the dayton rs driver line at partsexpress.com the rs 28 tweeter is the one i mentioned