Open baffle - time for an upgrade

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Well, I've been very content with my hi-fi for a couple of years now (I've seen a psychiatrist and he found nothing wrong ;)) but somebody mentioned Gainclones to me recently, and the next thing I know is I am building amps again and coming back to diyAudio to see what's going on. One thing leads to another and I land up on the speaker forum, and now I'm thinking about upgrades to my open-baffle speakers. :cool:

My OB's use Hawthorne 15 inch Augie woofers, Goodmans 201's (which were rebuilt for me and tweaked for use on an OB), and Realistic 40-1310 bullet tweeters (I believe they are meant to be identical to Fostex FT17 tweeters). I get away with a 4th order active filter for the woofers, limiting the bottom end of the 201's with a first order filter into the amp that feeds them, and just a cap on the tweeters. I use a DEQ2496 for some room correction and to correct the speaker response too, and it all works very well.

It's the tweeters I am looking at changing, and after reading an article on super-tweeters would like to go along that route too. The tweeters don't need to go very low at all (I'm currently using a 0.47 uF cap on the 8 ohm Realistics). As ever I'm on a low budget. The 201's are about 95 db sensitive so ideally the tweeters would be the same or very close.

Looking around my choices would seem to be :

HiVi RT1 that seems to come in several versions. I also looked at the RT2 but it doesn't seem to be readily available in the UK and I don't need to go low enough to justify the extra power handling. I think the RT1's only go up to around 22K though.

The RBT95SQ is cheap and cheerful, and goes to over 40K, and it's 95 db sensitive.

The Fountek Neo CD3.0 is 95 db sensitive and also goes up to around 40K.

All these are within my budget but are there any more that you can recommend that are easily available in Europe? Are there any dipole super-tweeters at the same sort of price (say around 130 euros a pair)?

Am I likely to notice a real improvement over the current tweeters?

And would I get away with just a capacitor on the tweeter as I do now? I realise that I could be opening a can of worms here as regards crossovers and I don't really want to go down that road if I can avoid it. But any advice will be welcome. :)
 
Hi,

FWIW I'd say the top end of such an arrangement is more about how
well the tweeter integrates with the midrange than the intrinsic quality
of the tweeter, (as long as its good of course).

AFAIK the BG Neo3 (93dB) can be used as a dipole super tweeter,
but without the rear cup, even if you put a a say butterworth 2nd
order 3KHz on it to protect it, its actual response will look like a
first order roll-off at around 10KHz down to near the x/o point.

Zaphaudio said:
Bohlender Graebener Neo3 PDR ($55 w/flange) :
This B&G tweeter outperformed everything here, in most cases by a large
margin. Response curve is ok, but nonlinear distortion is excellent. This is
a very clean and natural sounding tweeter. Note: these were tested with
the rear chamber in place. Later, with a different pair, I also tested with
the chamber removed. The tweeter was far too overdamped in that
case, and I recommend leaving the rear chamber installed.

The goodmans 201 roll off above 10KHz I read somewhere .....

rgds, sreten.
 
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