Its always intriguing to me how the little spikes of higher order harmonics draw immediate attention to themselves and define the overall acoustic signature of a midrange.
The cheaper metal mid domes tend to fall short of the clinical sterility typically associated with most metal dome drivers. When you remove all the enhancing 2nd order harmonics softer dome materials tend to exhibit, you're left with a rather dry presentation of music. This allows for all those little annoying peaks and other issues to come through, which can ruin the overall transparency of the driver. I think this is why we rarely see budget priced larger metal dome mids.
The only one budget metal dome mid coming to mind is the Dayton 52AN. This driver sounds irritating to my ears. It has quite a bit of junk across its "useful" passband with a breakup peak that wanders depending on listening axis. I have heard one or two sucessful implementations of this mid, but it requires ALOT of attention to make it sing. The money you save on the driver is quickly spent on crossover parts to make it behave. Such is the case with some other dome mids.
The cheap hivi DMB-A has some potential, but you have to deal with the junk in the lower mids, included the poorly dampened, high Q lower rolloff and hash in the upper mids. Once you have to pull apart a driver to mod it, trying to address some of its engineering shortcomings, its no longer a bargain driver, especially when needing to purchase an extra driver to get a decent pair.
The cheaper metal mid domes tend to fall short of the clinical sterility typically associated with most metal dome drivers. When you remove all the enhancing 2nd order harmonics softer dome materials tend to exhibit, you're left with a rather dry presentation of music. This allows for all those little annoying peaks and other issues to come through, which can ruin the overall transparency of the driver. I think this is why we rarely see budget priced larger metal dome mids.
The only one budget metal dome mid coming to mind is the Dayton 52AN. This driver sounds irritating to my ears. It has quite a bit of junk across its "useful" passband with a breakup peak that wanders depending on listening axis. I have heard one or two sucessful implementations of this mid, but it requires ALOT of attention to make it sing. The money you save on the driver is quickly spent on crossover parts to make it behave. Such is the case with some other dome mids.
The cheap hivi DMB-A has some potential, but you have to deal with the junk in the lower mids, included the poorly dampened, high Q lower rolloff and hash in the upper mids. Once you have to pull apart a driver to mod it, trying to address some of its engineering shortcomings, its no longer a bargain driver, especially when needing to purchase an extra driver to get a decent pair.
Jup, that's how the RS52 sounds. My hearing experience comes very close to what you describe here.
I crossed them pretty low so it was not very pronounced but still noticeable. As it was active I had no dampening for the (high) membrane resonance - this would be the perfect driver to give the effectiveness of such dampening a listen.
Drivers do distort, they are the weak point in any system and even the most neutral ones like Purifi or Bliesma are still distoring in a way we can hear. Our hearing can hear distortion to +80dB below the fundamental, and most drivers get distortions to 40 to 50dB below the fundamental. paper distort in another way than metal or plastic and so on. So the distortion is a big part of that "sound" of a driver, study the distortion in detail and you learn more, and after studying enough drivers and their distortion profile you will see what you like and what not from graphs. I know i can predict almost perfect if I will like a speaker partly due to that (there is more off course, di and frequency response are also major factors. But distortion is often overlooked. The high rated Bliesma T34B has a high 3th order distortion above 10K, something i often see with BE tweeters, and what is probally causing the sharp fierce tone i don't like.