Which tweeter captures soprano best?

[gonglee]

I am in love with the pretty sound of soprano - I would like it to pierce my heart, not just hear it with my ears.

Old Klipsch speakers do that but the color is not neutral for me - too bright.

Does anyone know of a tweeter that is transparent and has a pretty sound that will pierce my heart?

I've been searching for a long time - hopefully I will get to my sonic-Nirvanah ( with your help )...

[5th element]

Interesting you should mention the tweeter because the highest note a sop is called on to sing is a top C which is about 1000hz.
Most of which is below this for obvious reasons.

For vocal performace you need a good midrange driver, such as a Seas excel cone which is very rigid and thus has zero cone brakeup to smear the sound, in the sopranos passband.

This does however exclude harmonics which the tweeter will most deffinately have a contribution with.

There is one thing that may not be good news to you, and that an elavated trebble (brightness) can make female voices seem to sound better adding brilliance to them. So toning down the treble to give less coloured sound could alter the way you like the soprano to sound.

However dont dispair, there are lots of tweeter out there which are very good. I have not tried any ribbons but it sounds like a ribbon may be what you are after. Soft dome tweets I have heard and like are the scanspeak d2905/95 and 97. The 97 is the winnar! but then again it should be better then the 95 considering it costs much more. Soprano does indeed sound very good through my W15CY001's and SS 97's.

Others to consider would be the Seas millenium and the scan 99, which is identical to the 97 but uses a different face plate which horm loads the dome a little which changes the sound. Some people prefer the 97 some the 99. Maybe perhaps the Hiqupon OW1 also if you can crossover higher 2.5k plus.

Matt

[phase_accurate]

The most natural human voice reproduction may still come from good fullrange drivers.

Matt is right about the frequency range covered by the keynotes. But sopranos can still cause quite a lot of sharpness in tweeters. I once auditioned, an otherwise very fine sounding active speaker (with Jazz it sounded better than many much more expensive speakers on the same highend show !), that got problems with a soprano recording that I asked them to play. I think the sharpness was due overexcursion of the tweeter. Though I did not intend to make the guy play that CD for this reason (it was simply because it is one of my favourites) I now use it to find tweeter weaknesses as well.

Regards

Charles

[qi]

You also may enjoy the new Magneplaner quasi ribbon (80 - 20k hz) speakers.

At $299 / pair they are hard to beat, and they have a 60 day money back guarantee (I have no affiliation).

Regards
Joe

[Timn8ter]

The most natural human voice reproduction may still come from good fullrange drivers.

[johninCR]

Originally posted by phase_accurate
The most natural human voice reproduction may still come from good fullrange drivers.

I believe that full or wide range drivers can achieve the most natural human voice reproduction but only when they are used on an open baffle. The "sonic-nirvanah" you are looking for comes without a box and without a crossover in the middle of the critical range.

[454Casull]

The Seas Millenium tweeter is flat above 1.4kHz, stores very little energy, and has less non-linear distortion than both the 9700 and the 9800. It's also cheaper than the 9700, 9800, and 9900, although you can't really beat the Human 002M @ $50...

[bishopdante]

Sir, I find issue with your use of language. You don't capture much sound with a tweeter, microphones do the job much better. Speakers are for reproduction not capturing. But I know what you're talking about. Classical music recording is an interesting subject, since the aim is usually to capture a performance as accurately and realistically as possible. The classical acoustic is very live compared to pop music, as much as 90% coming from reflections compared to direct path sound. The reflections come from all angles, behind, in front, sides, above etc. Also the operatic singing style was evolved specifically to take advantage of a live acoustic to gain extra volume and presence with an extremely wide vibrato and a reduced palette of vowels. Stereo sound recording is not at all good at reproducing this type of sound, being approximately quarter circle on a flat plane in front of the head. The theory with stereo is that you have two ears so you only need two speakers. In practise this is not the case at all. If somebody walks behind you slightly to the left you can hear exactly where they are, so the ear/brain takes a bit more fooling than just two speakers. Stereo was introduced in the 60s by introducing an extra speaker to be able to play the new releases. Nonetheless it sounds a lot better than mono! The reason why it sounds better is down to bandwidth, not because it is a fully immersive soundstage. If you add more channels of recording and more speakers you get more accurate and convincing sound than upgrading your components to double the value. I would recommend that you look into decent quality 5.1 recordings, which combined with a good dead sounding room and quality amps and speakers. NB: in the pursuit of better sound in the 1970s quadrophonic was introduced, and didn't catch on due to expense, size and the fact that quadrophonic vinyl would halve its playing time, and with tape people have to spend weeks whizzing backwards and forwards to find the song that they want to hear.

[phase_accurate]

I agree on the spatial reproduction part. I was able to attend a 2+2+2 demo that was organised by the local section of the AES.
The one who did the demo was the sound engineer of

http://www.mdg.de/indexeng.htm

I must admit it was stunning to say the least.

But this doesn't help our friend gonglee because his favourite recordings may not be available in multichannel, nor do we know if he could actually afford/place a multichannel system.



Regards

Charles

[critofur]

Originally posted by 454Casull although you can't really beat the Human 002M @ $50... [/B]

Pardon me for sort of hijacking this thread, but not unrelated topic, and it has been sitting dormant for some time...

You really like the 002M tweeters? Do you have some, or did you hear some? I haven't managed to find measurements for these tweeters

I haven't had the chance to "prove it" conclusively yet, but I suspect that I don't like crossovers. But, others say that most tweeters are not good for decently low frequency 1st order crossovers (unles perhaps playing at very low SPLs?).

Full range drivers have their own problems, so I'm thinking a two way (and a sub) with a simple cap on the tweeter, or, eventually, just bi-amping from a digital crossover, may be the best way to go until we get some radical new super drivers sometime in the future...

The reason for all my babbling on this thread is that that 002M tweeter was used in the aformentioned config - just a cap on the tweeter... And perhaps this type of speaker might satisfy the original poster, assuming the speaker is built phase/time aligned, either through driver placement or delay on the digital crossover.