Why aren't there any great cone tweeters?

I think,one of the issues with cone tweeters is the mass of the moving structure. The JBLs get away with it by being smaller cones and a really strong motor. They can have their way the cone at really high frequencies. Impulse response is pretty good with them.
 
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Hi JMFahey, I am pretty sure you also remember this ones:

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Gee!!!
I LOVED those LEEA cone tweeters and used them A LOT:
They reach surprisingly high, notice the aluminum dome glued straight to voice coil.

Great for Hi Fi, only problem for my personal use (LOUD PA way back then) was that they were EASY to blow.

I had to use many (as in 8 per cabinet in 2 angled arrays) and even so ....

Maybe you remember Johnny Allon.

One night he was playing at some huge "bailanta", he approached the PA speakers too much (I had custom made his mixer, power amps and cabinets), a short loud squeal ... and instant mud after that.

He had burnt all Tweeters 😱

After that I was forced to make my own high power version ... or else.

The JBLs get away with it by being smaller cones and a really strong motor.
That.

Cone tweeters are basically "small speakers" , with a definite rolloff point above which they drop like stones.

Making everything smaller/lighter does not beat the basic Physical problem, BUT if you can move it nearer to limits of Human hearing, that's "good enough" from a practical point of view.
JBL made a small light cone tweeter, period; the famous "phenolic ring" ones are simply a way to mount a 2" cone in a 4" frame.
Nothing intrinsic to the phenolic ring itself, it´s just a "mounting adapter"

They also made a "10" cone in a 12" frame", again using a "phenolic ring"
Or maybe it was Masonite!!! 😱

Can anybody check that?
 
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I actually made my own, go figure.
Cool! At one place I worked, we called those "G Jobs" = Government Jobs. I'm not sure how "Government" came into it, since it was stuff we were building with company parts, usually at lunch, for home use. AKA "Research" ha ha though actually you always learned something. I once built some 5x7s with a super hot Polydax tweeter, something like 94-95 dB/2V/1m. Wheee!!! A buddy built 6x9s so massive for an Alfa Romeo 164 prototype you'd swear there was a subwoofer.
 
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For the last decades, loudspeaker designers know that dispersion pattern vs frequency is important, which is a weak point of cone tweeters.
Yes...though domes aren't perfect either. I tried looking up some data but some of those full range are just large, and guess what? They start narrowing in dispersion at only several thousand Hertz. One not too expensive Audax is good to around 10k. I still feel something like a 2" should be able to cross over lower given like 4x the surface area of the dome. I guess nobody examines improvements and new materials because at the time the cones got their butts kicked by the domes, and never recovered. It would be especially interesting to work with honeycomb material; I once made some prototypes that had excellent dispersion
 
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I'm not sure how "Government" came into it, since it was stuff we were building with company parts, usually at lunch, for home use.
I think the gist is using somebody else's resources to work on your own project. To some, there's a similarity there to what the government does with pork, special interest groups, etc. Depending on your views, the term may make more or less sense.
 
Anyone ever try a pair of these?

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The big problem (for me) with most cone tweeters is the tiny VC, leading to low power handling. A big motor is the way around that, but unless the back chamber is very well dampened ( which most aren't), the tweeter won't be on the performance level of a good soft dome. The JBL LE25 was one of the few decent cone tweeters, mainly because it was designed with a large motor more like a good dome. The design of the cone was better than that of almost any other similar tweeter and was acoustically very well behaved.

The newer copy of the old CTS tweeter done by GRS is very good for the price. It sounds alot like a LE25 and is close to 95 dB / W.
 
Name your poison really. The defunct MA-Sota commercial range ran cone tweeters; I still listen to the Viotti One (with a filter I redesigned to suit my preferences) daily as my 'desktop' system & it's a very nice speaker. Does it do the top as well as, say, a 6640 etc.? Nope. But the power response is very good & to be honest, I can just put them on & forget about them, which is my no.1 priority, anything else being a bonus.