Temp setup: BEST MID AND TWEET we can buy ?

mid-tweets

Might want to track down a pair of these.. w/ xover @200Hz 24dB

http://www.atcsd.com/pdf/Product-Sheet-NeoPlanar-150.pdf

There is no "best ever" driver of any sort. They are all the sum of the compromises made by the designers. The best you can do is choose one that fits in with your design goals, whatever they may be.

Hi,

I'm a bit confused here. In one post you ask for

JinMTVT said:

What are the best woofers period ??

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and in another you ask for

JinMTVT said:

Excellent mid+tweet // suggestion??

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Woofer or mid-range? Or do you just want a mid-bass?

Zalytron have Accuton C12-6 tweeters for $195ea or C23-6 tweeters for $225 ea (I figure you probably don't want the D20-6🙂). They also have C92-6 mid-bass for $230ea or the excellent C95-T6 for $275ea. Either would give you an excellent 2-way, but you would then probably have to replace most of your upstream components and you'd have to look seriously at your cross-over component also. And that would be setting you back some serious bucks.

Have a look at some of Tony Gee's stuff on Humble Homemade Hifi. He has made some very nice 2- and 3-way speakers, using some very nice componentry (and carpentry). You may find some nice ideas there, and the added bonus is that he's a member of this forum. But, from looking at his final products, the cost split seems to be about 35% - drivers, 35% - crossover components, 30% - cabinets (depends on the speaker). And that's not including the software and time that he takes in development. But you could probably make one of his designs verbatim for the $1000US you mentioned.

mid/tweet

JinMTVT said:

why exactly are you suggestion those?
i have never heard of this company
and it seems to be a product directed toward public annoucements and stuff like that ..

have you used em ?

wanted to get the best of dynamic drivers though for this quick project..not sure that i'd consider planars

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Yes I've used them... thought you might want to consider them since they come up on ebay from time to time for ~400 / pair... and they are FAR Quicker than dynamics... especially in a dipole... ribbon like 150WRMS power handling... that sort of thing

thought you might want to do a little research...
The ones I got were custom fabbed, claim 92 ish sensitivity, response from ~200 Hz to 40KHz...

All I can say is they made quite an improvement to my RD75 dipoles..

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=1055085#post1055085

ymmv

JinMTVT -

I would suggest you visit www.zaphaudio.com - you will find a lot of very valuable information there - namely in the driver comparisons - and there are several designs there that might suit you.

None of them is dipole but you may be able to adapt crossover to that. You'll find that the most expensive drivers aren't always the best performing, though some of the Scan Speak ones do seem to be unbeatable.

Metal woofers take careful crossover design - some more than others, but you don't necessarily have to go with the Excel magneseium units to get top quality sound - there are lots of great aluminum woofers to consider, some requiring less complex crossovers to get the sound right.

Hope this helps.

P.S. - don't just look for the "best" individual drivers - look for the overall design - one thing that makes Zaph such an excellent resource.

For "hi-fi"-style drivers, the numbers would suggest these:

http://tymphany.com/datasheet/printview.php?id=55
http://tymphany.com/datasheet/printview.php?id=85

My advice is to build a single fullrange or 2-way TM speaker. It sound to me that your room is too small to really use a dipole, but that's merely my opinion..............And, I've been wrong before

The choice of "best" or even really good drivers is such a can of worms that there really is no right answer. The keyword is: "depends". IMHO, the absolute best driver is one which works best to satisfy the design criteria.

I'm going to just paste a response I made on another forum when a similar question came up:

<<I guess that I should share my thoughts on this.

I have seen more times than not, that people without a firm grasp of what's involved, buying expensive driver's and getting disappointing results. Fullrange/ Extended range drivers' are perhaps the one group that tend to be more forgiving than any other, but they do present some common problems shared by any DIY speaker system.

Rather than point fingers, I'll used myself as an example. I have two daughters attending college and a son that just moved from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. Being a single income, homeschooling family, the amount of available money for "MY" hobby is limited. Now, my wife insists that the kids are a result of another, seemingly harmless and inexpensive "hobby" that we shared an intense interest in at the early years of our marriage:^)

I guess that life is about choices and acting as a responsible adult. I put the money where it seems to have the best chance of producing a positive result, which I believe to be raising my children. As a result, I pursue this hobby with eye towards the "Bang for the Buck" and as a result use a lot of cheap drivers.

Dan Wiggins once mentioned that he thought a person would be better off getting decent measuring equipment and a handful of cheap drivers than all the books on speaker design and a set of expensive drivers. He felt that at the end of a year's time you'd actually have a better understanding of how all this works than by just reading about it. Now Dan probably didn't realize that Ol' TerryO had the notion that "decent measuring equipment" consisted of a Radio Shack SPL meter and a cd of test tones along with a digital multimeter:^)
He "has" told other people (who later related it to me) that I can "take the cheapest drivers and get really amazing results from them." I'm not the only person doing this obviously, but I do feel that a person needs to have some knowledge, usually grounded on experience, to pull this off.

At the most recent "Puget Sound! DIY Speaker Contest" it turned out that that the top three for "Best Sound" of the show had spent an average of $76.00 USD on their entries. I might add that two of these entries were two-way speakers with crossovers. OTOH, 3-LockBox (Todd Lee) had entered a fullrange bipole/ passive radiator speaker using Radio Shack 40-1354a drivers which I believe would qualify as a cheap speaker by nearly anyone's accounting. Everyone that heard them seemed to think they were pretty special.
My Radio Shack 40-1197 BR "Full-Tweek" speakers ($26.00/pair) came in tenth over all and they were the "cheapest" speaker entry in the contest.

Now for some perspective, there were 16 entries in the contest and the average cost of the top half (8) entries was $270.26. They included one entry in this group that had $1420.00 expended on componets!!!

The bottom half (8) spent an average of $421.28 on their entries. This included one entry that had cost the builder $1300 in parts.

If, just for the heck of it, we exclude these two speakers from the results (one in the top half and the other in the bottom) then the picture starts to become even more interesting.

The top half (8 entries minus the $$$$$$$$$ entry) then averages $106.01 per entry.
The bottom half, minus the most expensive entry, end up with an average cost of $295.75.

IOW: the top 7 contestants spent 35.8% of what the bottom 7 contestants had spent, on average.

Now for the obvious moral of all this: The less you spend the better the sound :^)...................Ok, maybe that doesn't work, otherwise my $26 "Full-Tweek" should have taken Best Sound.
I guess that perhaps I'd be better off letting others reach their own conclusions. So...........YMMV. >>

Best Regards,
TerryO

So i think that i will have no problem in giving a good sound to good drivers , and i see no point if downgrading the drivers just because the rest of the chain is not perfect ( wich it is never, but can come pretty close i guess )



So neway i feel like trying a 3 way system
( subwoofer is already covered )
so what i need now is mid/bass and tweet unit
for the upper pannel assembly

What about using 8 or 10" drivers for the mid/bass like Linkwitz suggests ? do you guys prefer using smaller mid-woofers in the 5-6" range?

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Take a deep breath, and read again what TerryO has just said...

My candidates for rully rully good mid and tweet;
Audio Technology (Skaaning) 15H52; we're using the version with the concave dust cap. ~ $200 US each.

Scanspeak D2905/9900 Revelator tweeter, at the same price.

We spent a lot of time with the slightly older Accuton midrange units, and at that time did not know enough about wiring and crossover components to get the best out of them. In the end, we decided that they compressed dynamics somewhat. Also, one split, although we did not know of any abuse.

The Skaaning is closest to the ideal dynamic mid I've heard. It is amazingly transparent, dynamic, clean, musical. HOWEVER, as a result, the remainder of the system needs to be excellent; crossover components, wiring, electronics, diffraction/reflection control, and room treatment. The Skaaning does not emphasize the problems of bad recordings in any way; nonetheless....

Much the same could be said of the 9900 tweeter. Polystyrene caps for it, and in our case, silver wire. Very clean, excellent at capturing cymbal shimmer (as opposed to the shishy white noise sound) and very satisfactory. The only tweeter we evaluated for this project, as it was obviously "good enough".

Both drivers seem to be quite neutral; hard to tell, because the character changes whenever another system element is changed.

Using the "best" drivers means that you have something of a "tiger by the tail" issue. Levinson 36 DAC, and the Pass X250 and Bryston 4B SST are being used with ours. Differences between the two amps are clear. The cabling throughout the system must be excellent as well. Given the nature of most CD's, I'd strongly suggest that any system errors be on the side of warmth and omission. As ever, the system should reflect a balanced approach, with due regard for interaction. Figure a year or two to get it to full potential.

Curmudgeon,

A few questions:

Where to buy the Skaaning 15H52?

How high can the 15H52 be crossed at?

Thanks.

This is the link to the price list. The C-Quenze are the modern series. You have to poke around the site a bit to see it all.

We wound up crossing it over at 5 kHz, a bit high, but we seem to have gotten away with it. Since our xo slopes are fairly mild, it does help the tweet.

I understand that since we bought ours the surround has been modified and again I mention that ours is the concave dust cap. Pers Skaaning is very nice and helpful, so I'd suggest emailing him with questions. I also understand that a Kapton coil former is now available, but I cannot comment on that.

Skaaning Price link

do not see why you say that it doesn't "show" the source weaknesses ...

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If that was in reference to my post, there is a misunderstanding. The Skaaning/Revelator combination shows everything. As we improved amplifiers (a CJ ---> Pass X250, and Bryston 4B ST--->4B SST), cables, crossover component quality, grounding, hookup wire, diffraction, etc. we heard each change easily. Considering the clarity of the last changes, we do not seem to have reached the drivers' limitations yet. As we improved the design, the tendency to emphasize source problems diminished. (I think it's additive effects, combined with the non-linear masking threshold effects. )

Cables; we hear 'em, and easily. If your listening skills are not developed to the point that you can hear cable differences, they are not developed to the point that you can reliably differentiate between xo components, especially capacitor types.

I should also note that we use LEAP and MLSSA; even for a relatively simple crossover (we use low order multislope), measurement and simulation tools are an absolute necessity; without them, I believe that it is very very difficult to achieve a design that meets modern standards.

Some comments on cables. Non-believers should avert their eyes.
This turned out to be a major diversion from the speaker project. As the speaker design improved, the cable differences became clearer; we had one "best" commercial cable, the semi-legendary WireWorld Eclipse III+ Gold; we also had the Kimber KCAG, and the semi-demi-legendary WireWorld Eclipse III+ Silver. While we were working with a single proto speaker, we ran a Levinson 36 DAC into a summing network (Vishay res) mounted at the amplifier's input jack. With no intervening eqpt, and a single pair of cables, evaluation was made a lot easier. The Golds were clearly the best, with the other two noticeably a bit less clean. The Golds are no longer available, and very expensive used if you can find them. Quite a bit of time was spent trying to homebuild equivalents. Latest configuration is a pair of Cardas silver #17 wires in VH Audio Hyperflex tubes, stuffed into a "bellows" corrugated teflon tube from McMaster, with Cardas RCA's. Very neutral, clean, transparent, and I bought a Cardas Golden Cross to add a soupcon of warmth and meat or punch, or whatever it is that they do. Mine from DAC to passive pre, Cardas from passive pre to amp. Traded off a little transparency, but in the real world of non-demo quality source material, satisfactory.

Speaker cables. Cost a major consideration, especially because I have long runs. To shorten the tale substantially, we preferred the xo at the amplifier end, and tri-wiring from there. We found that the Skaaning REALLY liked heavy metal; so 5 strands of Cardas 11.5 Cu in a "ribbon" -+-+- configuration. We did not find any Cu that was really clean for the tweeter, so used Cardas #21 silver, teflon sleeved in the same configuration. (And 1 pr Cardas 9.5 ga Cu for the woofer. )

All right, it's safe to look now🙂 . Let me suggest that eventually you will NOT want to hear what's wrong with your system. It's helpful only in assisting the elimination of that which reduces the enjoyment of music. People who listen exclusively to highly processed non-acoustic music won't get much benefit out of systems like these. A lot of recordings don't benefit much from such systems; but it can be a lot of fun to wallow in Rhino 50/60's instrumentals, the Rounder/Smithsonian reissue of Alan Lomax's Southern Journey, or 'most any Mapleshade.

I believe Solen is the Canadian distributor of Skaaning drivers.

Curmudgeon,

I was poking around the archives and saw that you had been using the Skaaning 4" Flex unit. What made you change to the 5" C-qenze, and how is it better?

Also, have you tried any other Skaaning units, specifically the 18H52?

Thanks.

ultrakaz said:

I was poking around the archives and saw that you had been using the Skaaning 4" Flex unit. What made you change to the 5" C-qenze, and how is it better?

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The 4" flex IS the 5" c-quenze... the c-quenze is just a newer version with a more extended response (..look at both driver's "sd"). The rising response of the c-quenze should help give a flatter response at higher freq.s with a fairly narrow baffle.