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Here is another subject that many people would not understand, however some of the advanced Vitavox S2 user will be able to follow me.

The MF compression drivers hat go all the way to 12K-13K region all have own idiosyncratic way to present own upper region. In this article I would like to touch one subject – the texture. I am not taking about musical texture but the texture of sound presentation. This texture is very fine balance between consistency, coarseness and granularity of upper MF range. In upper MF the diaphragms of compression driver begin to break up. The small 1” metal cones that used in direct radiators tweeters break up at 30K-35K but the large 3”-4” cones that are used in typical compression drivers with 1.5”-2” exit break up at much lower frequency  (break up mans to have non-linear resonances). There are many different ways to prevent or to moderate the breakup of cones and here is where the main question arises: how a driver sounds in near to the break up state?

Before I was introduced to Vitavox S2 I was under impression that break up in compression drivers is something that I need to run away and the best drivers are “clean drivers” where all metallic nastiness is well damped or taken care by many other  than damping means. However, living with S2 and with injection later on I come to realization that not the breakup of diaphragms is a problem but the HOW the diaphragms breakup and the precision of the ration between the “clean” sound of driver and the driver resonances in breakup mode.

I know that some Morons who read this site will scream “Ok, now Romy advocates the sound of distorted drivers and sound of compression driver diaphragms with auditable breakup!” Well, I am glad that Morons have their typical idiotic feelings; the fear of what they cannot understand is their main guiding principle. The reality is that a properly implemented MF with properly tuned deliberate metal diaphragms breakup does sound as clean than any other driver topology but it has something else that not many other topologies offer: it has an ability to present very fine texture of compression driver in breaks up mode as the part of organic sound that driver produces. The key in it is right amount and right quality of that none-existing artificial texture.

In a way it works very much like a Photoshop. An image that was shot always has some room for applying a very deliberate amount of Unsharpened Mask. So it too much and you kill the image but if the amount is very deliberate, sensible and very well measured then it works very fine. After all the beef ageing is just a control deliberate spoiling of meat…

So, from all said above I envision that an Ultimate MF compression driver shall have some kind of mechanical HF texture control. Vitavox S2 has fine result in term of texture control but it has no internal way to do it and to set S2 in right controlled break up mode it requires a LOT of ballet with this driver and lot of experience, not to mention that at time some of the ways to control S2’s texture might be worsening for other aspects of this driver sound. So, what I would like to see is the Ultimate MF compression to have an independent from anything else texture control that would allow very accurately to see the bandwidth, depth and damping of the driver HF break up. I think it might be possible by modifying the acoustic impedance of the throat’s screen and creating a front contra-pressure.  It might be also possible to do by having the geometry of phase p-lay to be very slightly modifiable in order to rearrange how pressure is reflected back to the diaphragms. Think about the jet fighter with adjustable configuration of wings… There are a few other ways that I might think of but this is not an attempt to design the Ultimate MF compression driver but rather to build requirements for it.

In conclusion, the most important message is that Ultimate MF compression driver shall have upper knew break up control INDEPENDENT from the way how the driver loaded of low-passed. To my knowledge there are no such drivers in existence.

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