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Re: Hmmm, milder tone here

Most speakers radiatate ALL of their high frequency energy directly at the listener. The higher the freqeuncy the worse it gets. Want proof? Just look at a Madisound catalogue. They have performance curves for many dozens of tweeters from many many manufacturers. And they all have the same fatal flaw, they all have incresingly narrow dispersion as frequency gets higher. By the time you reach 15 khz, most are down 7 to 12 db just 30 degrees off axis. Small wonder when reproducing full range sound such as from a cd player they are shrill. The best dispersion of any tweeter I saw was the AR 3/4" dome. It was only down 5db 60 degrees off axis. Why? for at least 2 reasons. First it was only 3/4" not one inch or an inch and a quarter, smaller being better at dispersion. Second, it did not have the semi horn loading all other manufacturer's dome tweeters have. Look at any of them carefully and you will see a small groove between the dome and the frame. This improves efficiency but reduces dispersion. Still this was not good enough even for AR. The LST which was cloned by Cello had 4 such tweeters aimed in 3 directions. In fact AR built that speaker for Cello for a while. Too bad they didn't incorporate this idea in AR9. Your speakers radiate 50% of their sound including high frequency sound away from you. That is much much better. But it's not nearly good enough. My speakers radiate well over 90% of their high frequency energy away from me just the way most real musical instruments do. That is why even when they reproduce music containing a great deal of high frequency energy, they are never shrill like conventional box speakers are. That energy arrives from many different dirctions. There are other advantages too. More tweeters means little or no tendency to dynamic compression due to voice coil heating. And full extension of the treble allows the bass to be fully extended as well if the speaker is cabable of it without sounding bottom heavy. As for imaging...well you know from your own experience that radiating high frequency energy over a wider angle doesn't degrade it, in fact it improves it making the stereo image audible even when you are not between the speakers. $35,000 is a lot of money for loudspeakers. Maybe it's the best you can do...if you have to buy someone elses answer to a problem.

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