David Louis brand

[kevinkr]

I am not a fan of full range drivers, but I have heard the L.Cao 8" in an OB and it was actually quite OK, about as OK as anything would be in that particular design. Build quality was quite good.

As always caveat emptor, but sometimes satisfying your curiosity may also prove to have a fortuitous outcome. (or not)

 

[Bill poster]

Re their Be tweeters. If the earlier post is true, I'm quite surprised they have got away with painting a beryllium coating on top of copper for so long. I assumed the beryllium they used was probably not the purest.
Pretty sure this thread will come to their attention and they'll chime in.

 

[bwaslo]

I don't know much about metallurgy, so does anyone know? WHY anyone would use copper for a tweeter dome? Is lead too hard to get? Or something heavier?

Must have something to do with getting the beryllium on there? Or maybe it's just another BS sciency sounding feature to label the thing with?

 

[boswald]

Thanks for the link, Bon. Always good to get a look inside the industry. I guess for most of us, Be will remain Inaffordium and Unobtainium, at least for now.

 

[ttan98]

I bought many drivers from them before:
1. 1 pair of 4" Full range
2. 1 pair of 5" full range
3. 1 pair of gold "Be" Tweeter

All are VERY good except the BE tweeter(below spec.) and I got some money back, I still haven't use them yet. Items 1 & 2 are very good, spec. and sound wise for the price I paid for them. I will buy from them again.

 

[Shaun]

They also sell random genuine branded drivers.
Any driver claiming to be beryllium that isn't horrendously expensive, isn't beryllium. Simple rule.

 

[silverprout]

Here is the Focal Beryllium room in France :



I expect that someone is not going to die from berylliosis somewhere in China...

 

[Patrick Bateman]

I don't know much about metallurgy, so does anyone know? WHY anyone would use copper for a tweeter dome? Is lead too hard to get? Or something heavier?

Must have something to do with getting the beryllium on there? Or maybe it's just another BS sciency sounding feature to label the thing with?

Back in the 90s, Audax used to sell a tweeter with "vapor deposited aluminum." This was a great way of saying "we spray paint the tweeter dome."

I believe that's the same reason there's beryllium coated copper domes. It's a gimmick.

 

[Patrick Bateman]

Chinese made, mostly knock off european designs

So their Be and ceramic dome tweeters came up on a google search - curiosity got the better of me. Neo magnet motor, some copper to be seen, reasonable looking response, but not much more info ie the purity of their domes etc.


Aliexpress page
AliExpress Mobile - Global Online Shopping for Apparel, Phones, Computers, Electronics, Fashion and more

Anyone tried their products? Dare one say they don't look too bad at first glance. but I guess there's an old adage to be mentioned at some point.

DIYMA has been raging about this for over a year now : Hot eBay deal - Alpine SPX PRO tweeters - Car Audio | DiyMobileAudio.com | Car Stereo Forum

IMHO, you get what you pay for 🙂

 

[silverprout]

Back in the 90s, Audax used to sell a tweeter with "vapor deposited aluminum."

"Vacuum deposition" 😛
Vacuum deposition - Wikipedia

 

[Patrick Bateman]

"Vacuum deposition" 😛
Vacuum deposition - Wikipedia

It was "vapor deposition." As in "we deposited aluminum particles on your tweeter with the compressed vapor inside of this spraypaint can."

John Krutke references it here, I remember it from a couple decades back.

Anyone know what this tweeter is? *PIC* - Techtalk Speaker Building, Audio, Video Discussion Forum

Here's a French in-wall speaker using the same marketing mumbo jumbo: Pixel Engineering

 

[silverprout]

It was "vapor deposition." As in "we deposited aluminum particles on your tweeter with the compressed vapor inside of this spraypaint can."
John Krutke references it here, I remember it from a couple decades back.
Anyone know what this tweeter is? *PIC* - Techtalk Speaker Building, Audio, Video Discussion Forum
Here's a French in-wall speaker using the same marketing mumbo jumbo: Pixel Engineering

IMHO, the vapor was here for the dome thermoforming.

 

[Lojzek]

I am not sure that you get what you pay for.

 

[woody]

I believe the product description doesn't describe it as being vapor deposited but rather as made from a beryllium copper alloy. If you look this alloy up it does seem it might be a good material for use as a dome tweeter.

 

[Bon]

If you look this alloy up it does seem it might be a good material for use as a dome tweeter.

I beg to differ. See my post #12 in this thread. I have compared quite a few tweeters in the last few years including the David Louis offerings. My reference is the ScanSpeak 2905/97000 which I know very well. I can't be bothered to list them all but my comparisons include many of the current silk domes from Peerless/Vifa/Scanspeak/SB as well as super expensive Transducer Lab Be, ceramic and kevlar domes. In the pics below are a line up of my test subjects and the rig I use to compare tweeters. I mate them with a Scanspeak Revelator 18W8531G00, one of my favourite mid range drivers. To get to the point, the David Louis CuBe was my least preferred tweeter of the ten or so tweeters tested. This opinion is based mainly on the subjective quality but I have included a raw FR of the David Louis raw response which shows a peak around 15kHz which is much lower than a typical good dome tweeter and consistent with high mass dome.

 

[boswald]

There's an old question answered with a questtion:
"Are they lying?" "Well, are they selling?"

What I'm thinking, Bon, is you may be able to put a nice coil/dome assy on that pretty motor, as David Ralph has done a few times.
Thanks for the graph. We could not have a better example of a worst-case scenario- that's not just a dip and a peak, that's a hole and a spike!

 

[Bon]

that's not just a dip and a peak, that's a hole and a spike!

Ignore the very last bar of the plot. This is just indicating of the total level. The missing bar just before it is just a seperator from the last plot bar at 20 kHz and the level bar. It does not indicate a deep hole. Sorry, I should have spelled out the format of my Real Time Analyser bar graph.
The peak at 15kHz is real though, as is the shallow dip just before it.

 

[janusz]

I got the following Davidlouis tweeters:
1. copper-beryllium;
2. textile dome (td330 dynaudio "based");
3. beryllium mk.2.

Got it for my PC speakers, was cheap and actually is good enough for that type of speakers. Better than most commercial PC speakers.

Textile dome is pretty good, I haven't yet fully tested it but listened to it as a replacement for Dynaudio d260 as one of Dynaudio drivers failed.

I just got beryllium mk2 tweeters. Initial listening was promissin. I just plugged it instead of mid-high system so the lower cut off frequency was about 800Hz, active 4th order Bessel. I hope I will not change my opinion once it is properly tested.

cheers,

 

[danza]

2. textile dome (td330 dynaudio "based");

Textile dome is pretty good, I haven't yet fully tested it but listened to it as a replacement for Dynaudio d260 as one of Dynaudio drivers failed.

I'd be very interested to hear more about this tweeter from yourself (or others). I'm pretty sure the D280s in my Dynaudio Audience 72 SEs are giving lower output than they should be (I have some Audience 42s to compare), so I'm eyeing up potential replacements.

Next step is to take the D260s from the 42s and trial them in the 72s. Need to look more into how comparable the D260 & D280s are first though...

 

[Bigun]

I noticed that Davidlouis has an interesting looking 12” fullrange driver.

I was looking at a pair of Audio Nirvana 12” but their prices are up 25% thanks to Tarrifs so I whilst waiting for the Tariffs to end I got curious looking for alternatives that direct ship to Canada.

2 unit DavidLouis P12 hiend 12 inch fullrange full range speaker | eBay