Music Lane

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Reducing distortions

Posted by layman on July 2, 2012 at 19:06:29:
B&W = metal tweeter + aramid fibers (kevlar) that stiffen when exposed to ultraviolet light (sunlight) resulting in a rasping, papery, gritty sound at the top of the drivers range. Same kinds of problems as the Magnepans.
I no longer use speakers with metal dome tweeters because the (metal) tweeters have a tendency to ring and shriek in the lower part of their range resulting in steely sounding high strings.
Ideally the driver should not overlay the sound of the recording with spurious sounds (resonances) of its own.
If you tap or scrape a driver, does it make sound? If it does, then those resonances will overlay the sound being reproduced.
For that reason, I like drivers that self-damp, that resist ringing...such as fabric dome tweeters and paper or plastic coned woofers (even some the newer space age foam sandwich materials like rohacell).
Electrostatic drive units also seem to be good at self-damping.
Going to class A amplification usually (but not always) means removing the kind of gritty and edgy sounding distortions that Class D, Class B and (to a much lesser extent) Class A/B type amplifiers produce.
Morevoer, gritty and edgy sounding (digital) distortions are a more or less permanent fixture of the CD standard of digital encoding. The better (CD) players can supress these but to my ears only higher resolution formats are more or less free from these issues (SACD being the most natural sounding to me).
In my system(s) I use speakers with fabric dome tweeters (scanspeak, dynaudio), and plastic coned woofers (dynaudio, rogers). The speakers do not sound edgy or harsh and do not shriek or ring. My main amplifier is Class-A. It sounds silky, refined and detailed and free of the hard, edgy distortions of many of the amplifiers that I have used in the past. My source is usually SACD but the Marantz SACD/CD player does a very good job with CD too. I am quite pleased.