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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Basic guide to advanced audio
Post Subject: Slightly different perspective on the subjectPosted by haralanov on: 7/31/2011
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 Romy the Cat wrote:
For sure the tweeter do bring some own positive element to sound as well. It is hard to describe what they do. They for sure add transients, bite to HF, nice extension of MF overtones but the most important they produce the smooth and what I usually call “lubricated” enter and exit for mid range tones. The HF, if they compliment MF properly, do the same job – they create proper, more natural, more auditably-palatable entry and exit for MF into auditable space. They sort of the lubricate the MF and make MF it interact with room more naturally and more discriminatively.

Yes, Romy, you described it very well, and it is perfectly normal to happen. Transient response is function of frequency and phase response and nobody could have realistic sounding transients if he has limitation of the frequency response. The tweeters even do some more – they extend the color spectrum of the acoustic system’s sound. Every midrange driver has a tendency to lack the color discrimination in its upper working range (due to different resonances inside its structure) and it makes Amati and Stradivari violins (just for an example) to have the same sound signature due to the lack of tonal complexity when reproducing their specific overtones. And if the frequency response is limited, they could even sound like violas! If the overtones are screwed in some way (and there are thousands of things in the drivers and the way the drivers are used, that violate overtone’s complex structure) then the sound gets very specific with its own taste, which is added to all of the reproduced sound. Speakers are just dead mechanical devices with no own intelligence, so they blindly add/distract their own taste and the really bad thing is they do it every time and always in the same way. The tweeter helps a lot, it injects a lot of color nuances, but only if the midrange channel has the potential to do some things correct. Besides that, every midrange/widerange driver blocks the very fine nuances in the decay of the instruments – without reproducing them, the brain could always recognize the sound is not real, but it is reproduced. It directly affects the musicality of the system, because it adds a lot of bricks and fog on the way of the communication bridge between the system and the listener, as something invisible just stays in front of the music and blocks the authentity of its messages.

decay without tweeter.JPG

So the tweeter is always needed. The bad thing is it deforms (in 99,9999999999999999999% of the cases) the perfectly round audio window, formed by the midrange channel and "pull" some notes sometimes at its axis. These are often the notes that have their fundamentals at the upper working range of the midrange channel. The higher the midrange channel extends (but only if it has good tonal complexity in its upper range!!), the less prominent that effect is. Doing this, it deforms the coordinate system of the sound field and mainly affects its deepness and unlimited openness. It could be very easily detected by just listening only one of the channels of a given stereo system. But first of all, I have to note this cannot happen if the midrange/widerange channel is not able to project that coordinate system. Everything depends on it. In the world of direct radiators it is mainly a matter of size of the driver. 8” widerange could not even dream for open space presentation, despite the fact it can have mind boggling tone. Just an example:
 
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Not even 10” – it could present the correct size of the images, but there is still a lack of the original space around these images. 12” – this is another world, but only if made properly. There are no 12” widerange drivers made commercially that can do this, so unfortunately no one can understand what I’m talking about. About the world of horns – I do not know – I just don’t have enough experience, but I suppose there is a minimum diameter of the horn’s throat (just like there is minimum size of the voice coil of direct radiators) in order to be able to project that space.
 
 Romy the Cat wrote:
I presume, in context of the conversion in this thread, you are not talking about switch off one of the Macondo’s stereo channels but rather switch off one of the Macondo’s HF channels.

No, no, I’m talking just about switching off one of the Macondo’s stereo channels – not the tweeter of one of the main channels. This is the only way to know the true capabilities of your driver’s setup and its absolute performance and it is the most difficult test for ANY system to pass.
So what do you hear after you switch off one of the stereo channels? Do you feel any collapsing of sound and especially the scale of sound? Do you feel that the sound is pushed inside your midrange horn? Do you feel the size of the instruments has shrunk down? Does the sound still breathes freely in the air? Are you still able to feel the original acoustic atmosphere of the recordings or you now have the feeling that the sound is just in front of you inside your room?

Best of all,
P. Haralanov

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