I have to wonder if opinions may be correlated to age. In my 60's, loud may be good if it's clean, for about 3 minutes... After which the 100 WPC and the power VC heating compression, the 110 db transients are no longer necessary factors. If concert DB levels are frankly unpleasant to be in the same room with, that opens up a lot which would have been otherwise cut from the compromise matrix.
Suffice to say a speaker that satisfies someone in their 20's to 40's may be a completely different animal than 60's on up. And I'm sure no one discounts the 60's on up market; who's got the cash, the "last chance for something nice" before 'aids motivation to spend it?
Tweeters are a component of a young man's speaker. Wouldnt do for me - at my age - a damn thing. The ability to hear left from right, up from down and in from out is still there and that which re-presents those attributes in a most appreciable way beats concert SPL capability.
This is a better discussion, and my answer to the thread title is based on quite a few variables. But even at moderate volumes, I still find wideband drivers lacking.
Either way, there's no way to prove or disprove this debate. I'd say lets have a blind comparison, I'll bring my best multi-way build and someone in the wideband camp can bring their best full-range and we'll have a crowd pick a winner. But all that does is show majority, it doesn't mean the minority is wrong.
Either way, there's no way to prove or disprove this debate. I'd say lets have a blind comparison, I'll bring my best multi-way build and someone in the wideband camp can bring their best full-range and we'll have a crowd pick a winner. But all that does is show majority, it doesn't mean the minority is wrong.
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One possible explanation... loud can be fatiguing. We can't tolerate too much if it's fatiguing, which is related to what problems the speakers and room give us to process mentally.
Loud isn't supposed to come with a cringe factor.
Loud isn't supposed to come with a cringe factor.
C to C gets a bad rap these days. Sure, a bad crossover is a problem, but not all crossovers are bad.
One factor that may be of interest here is that we are less sensitive to the issue you mention when at supertweeter crossover frequencies, kind of like the way we also are sub 1kHz.
Yes but I think @jjasniew brought up a lot of valid points. It's safe to say that I'm in the tweeter over wide-range camp, and I also believe a loudspeaker that isn't capable of over 100 db is pretty useless. That's a good debate IMO, except that in that debate, I would have to bring up that even at moderate levels I (personally) think wideband drivers are lacking.
We deal with the scenario all our lives. When I was younger I often dealt with speakers that would distort before they even got loud enough to exacerbate their fatigue factor, so is that fortunate?
...and regarding fullrange drivers, if this is going to be a factor it's worth mentioning they have a tendency beyond tweeters in many cases.. that they are resistant to higher frequency cabinet diffraction and early room reflections due to their higher directivity index up high.
I say 'a tendency' because we can control this with any configuration of course.. but if you look around it's easy to surmise that the average fullrange listener would be benefiting from this.
...and regarding fullrange drivers, if this is going to be a factor it's worth mentioning they have a tendency beyond tweeters in many cases.. that they are resistant to higher frequency cabinet diffraction and early room reflections due to their higher directivity index up high.
I say 'a tendency' because we can control this with any configuration of course.. but if you look around it's easy to surmise that the average fullrange listener would be benefiting from this.
Right, which brings us back to the subjective game of choosing the compromise whoever is building the speaker prefers the most. I'll take a tweeter, I assume you prefer a wideband.
I guess if we're making radical generalizations, a "case in point" is the JBL Flip 5 BT speaker... Covers a wide range, sounds decent... Therefore I think everyone should quit building speakers. Problem solved 🤷♂️
Let me stop you there, as too often it is implied that a compromise has to be one that has no solution.
Building speakers involves many compromises. The goal is to identify each of them so you can trade them all off against each other for something that works. A difficult speaker is one where the factors are great enough that they end up being covered with little or no margin, but they are covered. Here you must be specific in design, and you don't have the luxury of reducing every problem into oblivion. You must know the audibility factor for each issue.
You don't need to be obsessive with issues... you should be thorough overall.
If my post seemed to imply that, it wasn't my intention. But obviously, as seen here, when any one of us are not in agreement, we can find "an excuse" for why the solution we're disagreeing about isn't a good one. For example, I still hear fairly well so I'll take the upper frequencies a tweeter brings over a full-range driver 😉
And when I was young and had excellent hearing, I found tweeters to sound fake.
We don't all hear the same.
We don't all hear the same.
Do you?
In my early car audio days I would use a twin-cone before I'd get a coaxial on a pod speaker. I guess I didn't like diffraction then, either. I similarly like fullrange speakers for certain intimate or background music situations.. and that's because of what they do well, not because of what they don't.
However what I do like is waveguides/compression drivers.
I've put a lot into dome tweeters and crossing them, and getting them to sound OK in the conventional configuration is no picnic.
I think most of us are using "engineering considerations" to aid us in the decision-making process. But I also think it's important to acknowledge the role of emotional appeal as a mover and shaker.
Additional thoughts:
-omnidirectional sound seems like one of those ideals that people often strive for, naive to the chaotic mess of echoes and low intelligibility that it would actually cause in most listening spaces. So, the narrower dispersion of 3~5" drivers vs tweeters would likely be a plus.
Earl Geddes et al have done a lot of work mapping the the spectral energy of speakers. Irrc, a common problem is a mismatch in the XO region between a midwoofer that has started beaming, and a tweeter that is omni in the same range. This gives a lumpy off-axis response and could help to (negatively) localise the speakers rather than the virtual image that they're trying to convey.
I'm not sure where you're getting 110dB peaks from. If a signal is spec'd at 85dB, I thought that that would already include the peaks.
I have fun with them all. But per the thread title, no, I don't think modern full-range drivers are better than tweeters. I've heard some I enjoyed, but I'll take a tweeter.
And while I don't believe edge diffraction is actually all that audible (any that is is a bad design), if it's that big an issue for you cross the tweeter a little higher.
I also agree that waveguides and CDs are fun, but I also think dome tweeters are enjoyable. As well as some ribbons, also some AMTs, etc.
It tends to get worse with level, so it's often mistaken for nonlinear distortion. However it's insidious, and I think it sounds worse. What causes it to appear nonlinear is actually our perception of it.
A system with a diffraction problem is one thing which could have you reaching for the volume control to turn it down, perhaps causing you to cringe at the thought of turning it up past a certain level.
But in larger spaces it can be amazing! I was very surprised.
In order to use engineering considerations one first has to learn the engineering. I fully agree that when it comes to a hobby the primary consideration is having fun and people enjoy quite different things.
A well designed omni-directional speaker will provide an enhanced sense of spaciousness for well understood engineering reasons, see Toole's book. It comes at the expense of image precision and tonal balance but some judge it price worth paying but not the majority.
A waveguide on a tweeter is used to get a desired radiation pattern in good examples of high fidelity speakers. To improve on that would one might use arrays of small drivers to support a programmed radiation pattern something like an enhanced Beolab 90. A possible use for small drivers.
The engineering considerations are given in post #227
I've been surprised at what is possible with omni, also taking in Pano's cave experience, so I have to wonder... Is it in fact the challenge of obtaining a fair and impartial reverberant field, diffuse and varied in space and time while trying to achieve this geometrically from so close to nearby walls, where the earliness makes anything too distinct stand out and when working with such a low DI?
It can be hard enough doing this off the back wall with regular speakers.
Broadly yes but you are asking someone in the process of learning a bit before having a go so there are better people to ask. It is easy to hear what they do if you listen to, say, a pair of MBLs. Achieving something similar with a handful of conventional drivers is the challenge. A fair few designs have used wideband drivers so it seems to be another application for them. My initial idea was closer to old Sonabs but it is hard to disentangle what looks like nonsense from what matters in their literature. I certainly heard spaciousness from them in the 70s but also too much high frequencies. Listening to a recent pair of Larsen speaker was disappointing but the room seemed less than appropriate. I have yet to find a design approach.