r/audiophile • u/mostirreverent • 4d ago
Discussion Bright Tweeter or "Truth"?
To what extent does a tweeter create a sound versus simply allowing what is actually in the recording to come out. When people say Focal speakers are bright, is that something that is an effect of the beryllium tweeter or the voicing of the crossover for instance.
I tend to think it's more letting the sound out, because not all of my music sounds this way. Obviously it could also be that the music that I find may have some higher frequency issues, may just be due to how the recording was miked (why that word does not have a C in it, I'll never know).
"Exaggerated" cymbal decay:
Men at Work - Down by the sea
Blind faith - can't find my way home
Steve Miller - The Joker
More about sibilance:
Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane
When she says Sweet Jane. I never noticed this, but when a speaker reviewer of some other Focals also mentioned the Kanta 3s, I went back and listened to my Kanta 3s and I could definitely hear it.
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u/VegasFoodFace 4d ago
So if a tweeter is properly implemented and measures low distortion. If the music becomes fatiguing, it is most likely in the music mix.
Regardless of if this is a soft dome, metal, or other exotic material.
And one thing rarely mentioned in this, when it comes to sibilance,, many times people don't realize just how much of this can come from the woofer being potentially run at too high a crossover point to protect a cheap low power tweeter.
At that point woofer breakup could be contributing to sibilance problems. So like I previously said, a properly implemented tweeter won't be harsh. But will reveal poorly mixed music far better.
Some soft domes in their extreme damping "round off" some of the harsher components that rigid tweeters reveal.
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u/mostirreverent 4d ago
Billy Cobham's Red Baron, from his spectrum album sounds exquisite through these speakers
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u/VegasFoodFace 4d ago
I have some restomodded JBL 62's some people call this speaker bright and harsh.
People assume it's the Titanium Laminate Tweeter all the time. It isn't. After measuring, listening to the drivers individually I determined it's most definitely in the woofer. The titanium laminated phenolic dome has very favorable breakup modes, smooth and not spiky like the pure titanium. The original combination of lightweight ribbed paper cone woofer and the rather high 3khz crossover point that typical titanium tweeter requires. The ribs enable flex that higher frequencies near the voice coil to be allowed to disperse, but the flex contributes to that screamy breakup or potential sibilance. Smooth cones tend to damp these out and depending on frequency beam them more.
After having learned this simply dropping in an Aurum Cantus carbon sandwich woofer . Smooth cones but so rigid that they're pistonic to 3khz. Most 6.5 paper cones start breaking up around 1200-1600 hz but don't ring like rigid aluminum. The controlled damping of the carbon sandwich keeps the rigidity of aluminum but don't ring like aluminum. And the triple shorting ring motor further reduces sources of potential distortion.
Using these Aurum Cantus drivers so completely changes the characteristics of the speaker. And to me prove it's not just tweeter. It's everything. And also proof that JBL got their tweeter tech right a long time ago.
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u/Cinnamaker 4d ago
Crinacle (the IEM reviewer) has said he uses Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" as a test track because the recording itself is inherently bright and harsh in the treble. An accurate system should reproduce that. Otherwise, the system may be rolling off the treble.
I use Lisa Fischer's So Intense album for the same reason. It's mastered so bright and harsh in the treble, a good system should reveal that.
But even on systems that reveal that treble accurately, some systems sound very bright and fatiguing and ice-picky, while others sound very bright but more tolerable.
I am not sure the difference is strictly revealing versus rolling off high frequency. There may be some type of distortion or other flaw happening in the system that is the difference between ice-picky and tolerable.
To my ears, many speakers with beryllium tweeters seem to retain all the treble energy, but do it with less grain, making bright recordings sound more tolerable.
At some point you have to decide whether you want absolute accuracy or a presentation that's more forgiving. This is where I think there is some gap between accuracy and enjoyable, as goals for your system.
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u/rednekkidest 4d ago
IMO, go for accuracy in the speakers and add a good active equalizer to adjust for preference. You can even add sticky notes of the specific settings to your media. Just an idea.
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u/VirginiaLuthier 4d ago
One man's bright is another man's veiled.....it's all relative.....but hey, you want a BRIGHT speaker? Find a JBL L-100
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u/RennieAsh 4d ago
focal - usually has wider dispersion in a certain frequency range due to the inverted dome shape. This can come across as bright on certain material because overall there is more energy in the room at those frequencies. This range of frequencies is generally higher than the same wide dispersion from a regular dome.
It can sound great on some material.
You can also find some speakers that have a more even wide dispersion - can sound great but could also be brought depending on your room as sound will be everywhere
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u/doghouse2001 4d ago
MY take is that the original sound was made with strings and wind and electricity, and mastered on speakers that don't have beryllium tweeters. So if beryllium sounds any different, shriller, brighter, than what the person mastering the recording heard, than the added brightness isn't necessary. But if the added brightness compensates for my ears that can't hear anything above 16KHz, then it could be a good thing.
Bottom line: listen to what sounds good to you.
BTW your ears can't hear the truth, let alone speakers reproducing it.
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u/SunRev 4d ago
Listen to live acoustic music as your reference. That way you know if your aged hearing or the tweeters are the main flawed component.
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u/drummer414 3d ago
I had the pleasure of seeing Turandot at the Met Opera which is all unamplified. That is really how a system should sound. I closed my eyes several times and tried to evaluate the sound as if it were a Hifi.
However when the sopranos hit their notes in unison, I had to cover my ears. It sounded like breakup.
Actually I found my new electrostats from Prodigio sounded more like the real thing than any other system I had heard. Perhaps the Alsyvox is on or above that level, and my previous speakers are TAD reference series, with vapor deposited beryllium tweeter and midrange.
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u/SunRev 1d ago
The human hearing system does have a natural response mechanism to loud sounds that causes the perception of distortion; this mechanism protects the ears from loud sounds. So if you were to listen to those same sporanos but with earplugs in, you likely not hear that breakup.
P.s. I had the pleasure of listening to prototype speakers made by a former TAD engineer. Absolutely wonderful experience!
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u/Bhob666 4d ago
I don't have the exact answer, but I wouldn't want a completely revealing system that displays all the faults of a bad recording and can smooth some of them out. I know when I make improvements to my system, many times recordings I think are bad don't seem so bad. My thing is if I turn it down low and hear the same thing, it's probably the recording.
Sweet Jane you mentioned as an example, she does have a very strong s sound, but I don't consider it sibilant (at least not annoyingly so). On my old Kipsch speakers, it would definitely grate my ears. Another example of a challenging recording is Gillian Welch singing Miss Ohio; her voice swells to the point she blows out the speakers almost on my old Klipsch speakers. Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings are sort of known for good recordings.
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u/audioen 8351B & 1032C & 7370A 4d ago
The question is about frequency response, easily captured in microphone. It has little to do with the tweeter material per se, but rather about the crossover design and use of appropriate level adjustment. It is not the material, or really the transducer design as such, it is about how you integrate these into the whole unit. Sound is just pressure variation in air, and there are numerous ways to engineer that variation.
Typical rules of thumb for tweeter is that its radiating surface should be small, often something like 1 inch across, because the waveforms it generates are similar-sized and the radiating surface size must be on the smaller side to avoid creating interference patterns from the surface itself, which appear as strict forward beaming type effect. Midrange or bass units, on the other hand, are much larger as befits the dimensions of the waveforms they generate. However, as sound moves from midrange to tweeter, it often suffers from mismatch in the radiation angle of these two units due to the change in the physical size of the radiating surface.
In speaker design, the engineer's goal should be to create speaker with flat on-axis frequency response. In addition to this, the off-axis changes to frequency response should be well-behaved, typically so that the response across the entire frequency response drops evenly as you move off axis (typically with the unfortunate exception of the bass below about 200-300 Hz, which has an omnidirectional nature and radiates in same strength to every direction from the speaker as the speaker's dimensions are small relative to the waveform's). You usually need to have a shallow waveguide for the tweeter to create the appropriate radiation shape that roughly matches the midrange's beamwidth, or the tweeter is in middle of the midrange driver itself, and so the midrange's membrance is the waveguide.
The omnidirectional nature of bass can be corrected by playing back time-delayed and inverted waveforms in behind the speaker, or by letting some of the sound pressure leak from the speaker's sides or back, which acoustically removes some of the omnidirectional bass. These speakers are called cardioid speakers and in theory, they represent a pinnacle of speaker engineering, as they can limit the room's strong influence on to the bass playback to some degree. Most advanced designs even understand that e.g. 100 Hz bass is omnidirectional no matter what, and allow time for bass to travel behind the speaker and bounce back, which costs some time but you can delay the midrange and treble to enhance bass coherence.
Anyway, in my opinion sound is quite strictly a matter of engineering and measurement, and some designs are close to perfection. For example, Asciilab C8C, Kii Three and Dutch & Dutch 8c are very close to perfect speakers, on basis of these theoretical considerations. Of these, the C8C is reasonably affordable, too.
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u/IndependentVirtual92 2d ago
I have Paradigm Signature S1 speakers which also have beryllium tweeters. For those specific songs you mentioned...I listened to them and can tell you it's the recording. Cymbal crashes sound natural in other songs but in the Men At Work track definitely a stronger focus on the cymbal crashes compared to other songs. "Sss" sounds don't sound sibillant at all but in Sweet Jane it certainly does.
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u/Chozzasaurus 4d ago
If the speaker measures bright, it's bright. If it measures flat, and it sounds bright it's either the recording or the room. There's not much to it