Focal Dayton Avaclone

[fivestring]

Focal Utopia TBe
Focal Utopia 6W 2 Be
Dayton SD 215-88

Thought you might find interesting this. I`m not a fan of domes (even if they are inverted ones) and cones for the midhigh spectrum, I prefer taller planar type of speakers (planar magnetic, ribbon or ESL), simply for their much greater realism. However, in my 20 years of experience with really a lot of dynamic dome tweeters and cone midranges, these are the first I have come across that don`t sound boring or even annoying, like the most of them did. OK, they`re still light years behind planars, but they`re much more tolerable.
Focal Utopia TBe tweeter is astonishing in it`s absence of any material resonances and the mid is very well behaved in this regard too.
I have used them in a way their makers never do: low order crossovers and short TL for the mid. The whole box was actually meant as a Avaclone at first, but I have changed the interior structure and gave both cones TL loading, well sort of. The short midrange TL is actually completely filled with polyester as well as the first part of the woofer TL, the remaining line has foam on one side of the line only.
Since the front baffle is a bit back sloped, the already well controlled 6" mid cone breakup modes were even less noticeable, so I was able to use 1st order lowpass at 3 kHz for the mid and 2nd order highpass for the tweeter, XO between woofer and midrange was set to 300 Hz, 2nd order both. The woofer TL is tuned to approximately 33Hz and the cross section area is at least the size of the 8" woofer or even bigger, which ensures much better dynamics than with a, say typical BR tunnel of 7cm diameter.
The bass performance of this 8" Dayton unit is good, but the upper spectrum is reproduced with transparency, great detail, seemingly very low IM distortion, great dynamics, smoothness and liquidity I previously thought was out of reach for this type of drivers, but all this comes with a hefty price tag, as you probably know.
In short, domes and cones in the mid high range will never reach the level of planar type speakers reproduction, with such small surface area they are disabled right from the start, but I must admit some progress has been made here.

Cheers,
miro

[Inductor]

Very Nice, miro/diyAudiofivestring.
(I'm going to save (your speakers) on my Focal Bookmarks)