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In the Forum: Audio News
In the Thread: The best speaker in the world, is yet again available
Post Subject: Why no diamond tweeter - any technology in hands of barbarian….Posted by Romy the Cat on: 11/7/2007

 morricab wrote:
It is a good question that I also asked when I saw this speaker.  Afterall, everything being equal using the same materials for the drivers is more optimal from a coloration standpoint.  My guess is cost.  They already had splurged for that hellishly expensive midrange and they want to keep the speaker priced in a range with the Wilson Watt/Puppies of the world.  Add the diamond tweeters and now you are looking at $40,000+ speakers.  This Supravox tweeter was perhaps the best they could find and still kept the price in the (more or less) real world.

Personally, if the diamond midrange is as good as they claim then I think it makes sense to push it as low as possible.  Of course going too low and you run into distortion and dynamic limitations.  I have found that speakers with a wide bandwidth midrange often sound quite good because the coherence through a critical range is good.  My guess is that they can run this mid easily to 5Khz without issues.  Perhaps even to 10Khz before the dispersion really starts to suffer.

I would not dismiss this speaker out of hand because it does look like a serious attempt to make a good sounding "conventional" speaker.  I see nothing wrong with them touting that they give you more expensive parts for the money.  It also throws a bit of mud in the face of other really expensive speakers when you see what the drivers cost (and that is retail prices which for sure the manufacturers don't pay), which I find kind of funny.

It reminds me of when Bobby Palkovic from Merlin tried to convince me that his $10,000 two-way speaker was justified in the price because it was so expensive for him to build.  I calculated that there was only about $600 per speaker in materials...

Has anyone heard the Marten Design Coltrane Supreme to know what the diamond mid and diamond tweeter sound like?  I have heard Lumen White speakers with Diamond tweeter and it wasn't bad at all with Ayon Reference 52B monoblocks.  The Avalon Eidolon Diamond sounds boring with a Pass labs setup.

Defiantly, why not? I do not think that anyone has an answer to it ironically, as I can see it, the problem here is not with diamond tweeters themselves.  We do not judge the diamond tweeters but rather the implementation around the diamond tweeters and here is where the problem I see lays…

Any company that I know of, and the sound or products am familiar with, since they went for diamond tweeters (after they formerly used other tweeters) got very unfortunate results. The Avalon Eidolon is just one of the long line of them – how wonderful was the original Eidolon and how bogus become the late Avalon production. This list would go on but does it mean automatically that diamond tweeters are some kind of ultimate evil? Not really and I see in all of it a bigger fish to fry.

The last few years audio industry invented a new definition of hi-fi sound and the majority of selling and writing cretins are aggressively hammer-in the notion of this sound into the vulnerable mind of morons-audiophiles. They the supply demands kikes into the game and as result tweeters are not used to care a proper TTH pattern but rather to imitate the glory of SS application form beginning of 70s.

I still would like to see a company or a designer with civilized sonic objectives employ a diamond tweeter in his arrangements – who know – it might do well. The only problem is that the designer will have no market to see his loudspeaker the demands of the target market had already been screwed. Look around, you will see many of manufactures who are capable for “good sound” obliterate (some of them deliberately) better sound in own products, replacing it with barbaric industry-promoted “sonic thrill”. It is very difficult to judge a specific topology of the drivers in this environment. I do confess that any single speakers with diamond tweeters I have heard were crap. Was it the fault of the diamond tweeter? I do not know but I certainly do not think so. As I always say – any technology in hands of barbarian produce barbarian result…

The caT

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