My quick-and-dirty PM6A 360° before the pair were placed onto steel umbrella stands. The deflectors were hand-wound-and-sculpted from 0.5mm-thin 1cm gasket foam tape (unpeeled except at both ends). Excellent stereo imaging with deflector, none without. But I was scared off by the much greater raw SPL needed.
Modelled after the 1960 Harman Kardon Citation X 360° which used a custom version of Lowther PM6 (further aided by a flat back-reflector) http://roger-russell.com/omni/omni.htm
Last edited:
Yes, although it's difficult to make valid comparisons because there are very few drivers out there which are identical in every way apart from the cone material. However, in a very broad brushstroke sense (which is not always applicable) paper cone wideband units tend to exhibit higher HD2 in parts, if not all the range, with metal cones trending toward HD3. If they do at all -see previous caveat.
Polymer / 'plastic' types of various kinds are fairly rare for wideband units -not unknown, but fairly rare, unless they get support from subemitters made of different materials, e.g. an alloy or similar cap etc. The material typically has high self-damping, & since wideband drive units produce the majority of their BW through TL (resonant) modes, it's usually not ideal by itself. Tang Band have a couple; I can't think of any other current units off-hand. I've tried to get MA looking at a couple of relatively extreme variations, and I believe they are, but don't watch this space, and definitely do not hold your breath in any way, shape or form as it probably (almost certainly) won't happen, and if it does, it will not be in any kind of timescale worthy of attention or even interest at this moment in history. 😉
No, we probably cannot draw a one-sided conclusion about how a particular cone sounds.
A hard cone, such as a metal or coated paper cone, is perhaps more homogeneous than a pure paper cone. They are usually heavier and the weight reduces the ability to reproduce the small details.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Getting more warmth in voices may well be the lack of the lower middle register.
Plastic can have better properties than paper. The pioneer fullrange twin cone actually sold sounds classy with current drive Amp. I tried it out. It has no Faraday ring so it profits of distortion reduction and frequency compensation a lot.
If you can order directly at a company you can get identical drivers with different cones.
A German Hifi magazine made once measurements with same driver but three different voice coils: aluminum, kapton and the third material I do not remember. There were differences in frequency response and resonances and even TSP
If you can order directly at a company you can get identical drivers with different cones.
A German Hifi magazine made once measurements with same driver but three different voice coils: aluminum, kapton and the third material I do not remember. There were differences in frequency response and resonances and even TSP
Well, most metal alloys, assuming they haven't received any surface treatment, are basically homogeneous, unlike paper or coated paper where the material is inherently fibrous in its structure. The relative masses of the cones will depend on the cone profile & specific materials used, so no single answer to that. For otherwise identical drive units, a lower Mmd (and thereby Mms) will result in a higher conversion efficiency, whatever the material used. I don't really like the term 'detail' as what we're listening to is basically linear and non-linear distortion, and to a point decay time, which again is as much about the design details as it is about the materials -as always, it's about what you do with them. That said, since metals by nature have very little self-damping, most tend to think that over the region where TL modes dominate, they tend to have more 'detail' (whatever that is) than some direct equivalents -although that takes us back to the 'all other things being equal, which they almost never are' bit. 😉 Since HD3 may be more significant in the non-linear stakes with metal cone units across this range (may. Perhaps. Possibly) that would also trend that way, or lean in that direction.
Probably. An excess of midrange output can tend to be perceived as a lack of whatever 'warmth' is taken as. The Yamaha NS10 for instance is a notorious example. It found its way into a lot of studios after failing as a commercial proposition. It didn't end up in studios because it's a good speaker in outright terms, but because it's got a ~6dB peak between about 700Hz - 2.8KHz with everything > trending about 1.5dB or so hotter than the bass end. Which is horrible in many ways but a useful tool for studios to check mixes because that excess of output ensures that if your mix is even slightly hot in the midband, it will be extremely obvious. That also helps to a point in mixing for quickly highlighting errors in a mix which might take a bit longer to identify on something that's better balanced (read 'accurate').
I suspect you mean VC formers rather than coils? Yes, the coil former material can have a significant impact on the motor characteristics, which in turn will affect everything else.