Skytronic Drivers

[delphiplasma]

Hi All,

Just wondered. What is the background behind Skytronics speakers? They seem to be very well built for a very small amount of money. Are they badged drive units? How do they sell so cheaply with the sort of build/design quality?

Thanks

[becki200]

Cant tell you why they are so cheap, but i can tell you that they are pretty good. Not high-end, but much better than other cheap speakers

[delphiplasma]

Ah, now I see why they are so cheap. The manufactured tolerance isn’t that great. I bought a Kevlar coned unit and bought a second one separately and noticed a difference in the stiffness and dampening of the cones. The measurements were very much different between the 2 units.

It would seem that picking a batch of drive units and then match the units for the best pair match.

[becki200]

Pretty good idea. Please tell me how these kevlar cone speakers sound ( i have had only the ones with pp cones)

[dukesos]

excellent value, having bought a couple of pairs at a time, to rebuild old speakers.

[SimontY]

I have some of their woofers but have not finished building the speaker panels yet! I'd say that the value for money is great, but what you lose is quality. The front gaskets are slapped on willy nilly on the 12" woofers of theirs I have - I had to cut away a lot of glue to put bolts through the mounting holes.

Simon

[delphiplasma]

Kevlar cones sound better than PP cones (Midrange), to my ears anyway. If you get a good sample the response curve is pretty smooth. However, I had one with a peaky rough curve above 1 kHz, didn't sound too good either.

If you use them primarily for low frequency audio, you can't really go wrong.

[SimontY]

I bought 4 x 12" PP cheapies for LF duty on my new open baffle project. Variance here won't be an issue.

I played one of them just resting on the floor and distortion did set in quite early, but they seem good for £15 each!

[delphiplasma]

Just been doing some more research on the skytronic 6inch Kevlar cones. I’ve been doing quite a bit of testing. The general response curve, in free space, is pretty smooth from around 70hz to 1khz. Above this frequency things aren’t too good. This driver would not make a good 2 way speaker system; it would need to be in a 3 way system. I managed to build a 2 way speaker with it and managed a fairly good frequency response, albeit with a 3-5db droop between 2 kHz to 3.5 kHz. This was achieved by excluding any xover filtering on the woofer and using only a 1st order on the tweeter. The sound quality not too bad, however the depression in frequency, noted above, gave a slightly forward lower midrange output. Pity, I was hoping for a good midband performance.
My next driver to test is the 5inch Kevlar unit. Already, this unit has a good response up to around 2 kHz, which isn’t too good for this size drive unit. However, it appears that skytronics may have designed the Kevlar rang to be used with a minimum order xover? I’ll see what the result is.
One question to the forum, does anyone know if the twin paper coned skytronic units have vented magnets?
Thanks