Best cone material: part two

July 31, 2006

Surely there have to be better cone materials than others for certain types of drivers. Tweeters have to have to have little mass and be very stiff, for example. Only certain materials meet those requirements. I think there should be some rules of thumb that could be established regarding better materials than others.

FD

I do think that cone materials matter to a particular driver type. Manufacturers of drivers research and develop materials as part of their business, and I do not debate that they have been quite successful in advancing their science. However, I don’t believe that you can predict a speaker’s sound quality based solely on driver type (cone, dome) and material used (textiles, silk, aluminum). There are numerous design choices that affect performance, but in the end it is how all those choices combine that decides what the speaker sounds like. To give you a sports analogy: You can’t tell how good someone will be in basketball simply by looking at his height. There’s simply more to it than a single trait. And so it goes with speakers.

Best cone material?

July 27, 2006

There have to be more cone materials for speaker drivers than there are reasons to use them all. Have you, in your varied speaker-reviewing experience, found a correlation with good sound quality and particular types of cone materials? Does any one material usually sound bad?

Franco

I have seen no correlation between a certain type of cone material and sound quality. This goes for woofers and midranges, as well as tweeters. The material used for the driver units in a particular speaker is only one design choice in a much broader picture. It is next to impossible to separate out any particular aspect of design and attribute a speakers’ sound to it. This goes for such much-disagreed-upon subjects as ported versus sealed enclosures, high-order crossover slopes versus low-order slopes, and three-way speakers versus two-way designs. There are just so many variables -- and they all matter. But perhaps what matters most is how all of the individual design elements combine to create a finished product. No single element exists in a vacuum. Speakers have to be listened to and the sound taken as a whole.