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In my 40 years of making my own LF and LMF cones I have found that treated pulp produces the best overall tone and provides superior damping. Coatings can range from polymers to aquaplas depending on the frequency range you are trying to reproduce. For very LF (below 300hz) Aquaplas or a semi-soft polymer works best for me while for low-mid a polymer coating similar to that used by KEF works best.To improve piston linearity the coating should be somewhat thicker to the center of the cone. Have also found that thinner pulp is better for mid's as they require less damping and require more detail. Have had not success getting metal cones to produce a natural sound (lots of detail at the expense of tone). We use two types of coating on mids: one is a stiffening agent and the other is for damping. The damping is never applied uniformly on the cone.
mike young Thanks for sharing! Would love to find some content online which speaks on this process. Either reading or videos if you know any would be lovely, have a great day!
Paper for woofers, paper or silk for midrange and silk or mylar for tweeters. Nothing else comes close for the perfect tone. Metal drivers for the most part sound too piercing, not the soft sound that I prefer.
Other parts of a speaker including the spider, surround, and even the basket also contribute to the sound of the speaker. The electrical resistance of the coil increases as the coil heats up, coloring the sound even more.
I have a pair of Vintage Zenith 49cz852's and they sound absolutely stunning. They are 12" and are made of felted paper. They have 3/4" voice coil with vintage enamel wire, and a ribbed cone. The sound is just stunning. The clarity, dynamics, imaging, and timbre is unlike anything I've ever heard. I don't think by modern standards they have the best properties but they sound just mind blowing and thats what matters. I run them full range in an open baffle and they can play down to 80hz and up to 14Khz. I add a tweeter with a 1 uf cap to accentuate the highs.
Hi Paul, you forgot to mention a third important property: inner damping, how good the material suppresses resonances. But it is often opposing stiffness. The German DIY loudspeaker magazine Hobby HiFi recently showed that cone material is not the most important thing in a speaker. Mechanical losses that immensely affect sound quality are predominantly caused by a lossy suspension and voice coil former materials.
My speakers are paper cone woofer, cloth dome tweeter and aluminium foil coffee can seal for the pointy triangular whizzer piece added to the tweeter. It's an isosceles triangular piece about a half inch long glued to the tweeter dome. The whizzer makes the treble sound amazing, and you can hear the "shing" in the aluminum but it's quite pleasant and the cymbals sound like metal and sound like they are being "hit" instead of sounding like a "hissing air hose" (like the tweeters sounded like originally). (Whizzers designed by trial&error.)
For dome tweeters, Beryllium is the best you can get and diamond dome tweeters are a close second. Beryllium dome tweeters resonate very well above the human hearing range. For a midrange or a mid-woofer paper, kevlar, or carbon fiber are excellent materials. For a woofer, paper, carbon fiber, or polypropylene are excellent materials.
That what I've got for my speaker project monacor carbon fiber 6.5 drive for woofer b&w 6.5 kevlar for mid an a fountek ribbon for tweeter the magnet on the monacor is 6 inch nice drivers.they go low for a 6.5
I have some JBL 4311s, great sound from those cones, better than the poorly set up $30,000 Focals I had access to a while back. Focals might be awesome properly integrated, I never had the option to do that with them 😭
Beside structural integrity, diaphragm materials are also chosen for their timbre sound quality. This is why two drivers with different cone materials can have the same breakup frequency but will not sound the same. Each material has its flavor aside from measurements.
Paul, you are very astute with presenting explanations in a way we can all understand! Bravo! You are bringing so many others along so that we may all benefit from your knowledge. Much appreciated!
Pistonic drivers are not optimal. To have flat frequency response at all angles, the radiating surface area has to change size inversely to frequency. The beam angle of radiation depends on the ratio of wavelength to circumference of the cone or dome. This is one reason we have two, three and even five way speakers. If you look at the off-axis response, you will see that the projection angle narrows just below the crossover points where the woofer and midrange drivers are large in relation to the wavelength, causing adverse room interactions from the peaks and dips. Musical instrument design takes this into account. For example, in the violin family there is a small area of the sound board under the bridge and between the f shaped holes which radiates the treble frequencies, scaled to the size of violin, viola, cello and contrabass. The larger carved areas of the sound board upper and lower bouts are progressively more flexible and radiate lower frequencies. A loudspeaker diaphragm in a curvilinear shape with the right flexure and damping parameters can produce the same affect, of an effective shrinking of diameter with increasing frequency. I use a 15" driver with a 2" voice coil that has a rising response up to 5KHz, with an effective diameter around 5" at the top of the range and low end response to 30Hz. A well damped cone also lowers temporal distortion, making sure the notes stop as fast as the recorded signal. This flexure lowers the effective mass at high frequencies, and therefore the energy storage is lower.
the very best bass reproduction I have ever heard in a woofer is the JBL L100S from the 70s..what a deep and sweet sounding woofer..made from paper, with some strange rough sandpaper material on the outside..no doubt clumsy and slow, but somehow they got it almost perfect
i have always assumed that , rather than trying to adhere to the ideal of perfect cone stiffness and inevitably failing, the higher end drivers are subtly designed to intentionally flex at different frequencies in a controlled manner, in order to have more control over the sound output
Thanks for actually answering the original question. I have A one off special production run of Aluminium cone 5" woofers. So far I have not heard anything that beats them. And I also agree that paper cones present music nicely. Even paper tweeters.
I seem to always like treated paper the most. I'm currently enjoying some very inexpensive Sony bookshelf speakers with mica impregnated paper drivers. They just sound very good with my amplifier from the mid 70s.
Good question. Paper was the only material for decades, but in the late 80's all kinds of materials were used. From poly propelene, to fiberglass to Kevlar to aluminum to paper. And the material the surrounds were made of differed as well. silver Flute speakers use wool, strange as that might seem, but reports say that they are very articulate and provide good detail. In car speakers there have been several exotic materials used. What we need is a transparent, neutral sounding material that doesn't impart any quality of its own into the music being played through it. It seems funny then when good old paper cones still have their niche in speaker cones. Some of the best drivers made then and now use paper. I've got a pair of silver Flute drivers that I bought for my car, but it turns out I didn't need them, so I'm looking for a design to use them at home with. I think they would work great in a D'Appolito arangement for a computer, or home studio type speaker. Coupled with a tweeter that can be used below 2500hz they should sound awesome! I'm looking at the new GRS Ribbon tweeters to go with them. We'll see how that works out!
Great Video! Just like all the others! Seriously, I think your such a cool guy for taking time from your family and life for doing this for us! I have learned so much from you!
The Harder the material the better it resonates High Frequencies, the Softer it resonates Low Frequencies. Paper or compressed paper cones have the most Natural Sound. Some materials like Poly carbonates and Aluminium' though they are harder, they can be driven with more bass to compensate because they are stronger' though there is a limit before the material vibrates and becomes audible. Aluminium speakers can be made small and handle a large amount of bass. The best speaker arrangement is to balance 5 way components with a big enough sub woofer so that the other frequencies are balanced, woofer, mid range, tweeter and super tweeter and have harder materials for high frequencies such as Titanium Alloy Tweeters and Super Tweeters, then have a variety of other materials for the other speakers to get a balanced sound rather than thinking that there is one ultimate material. All have their positive and negative attributes. Paper tares easily and flaps, Metallic can sound metallic at high volume.
I can understand the desire for the 'unobtainium' zero mass, infinite rigidity material for a speaker cone so that it can follow the electrical signal as perfectly as possible. What I don't understand is the most common 'shape' of speaker cones. I mean, that I understand it from a rigidity standpoint, but not from an orientation standpoint. Since one is (assumedly) trying to "imitate" a "point source" wouldn't a cone facing the opposite direction (or a partial hemisphere, as in many tweeters and some midranges) present better physics for that? Could that possibly increase the accuracy of the sound field generated in the midrange? Thanks for the interesting topics, Paul. I may not agree with all of your points in all of your videos, but you always give me something to think about - and possibly a totally different viewpoint to consider. Take care!
The sensitivity of a speaker (i.e. loudness) is highly dependent on the area of the diaphragm - you actually want as large an area as you can get to push the most air! Theoretically any shape could work, but to maximize linearity and lower the harmonic distortion, you need something that is rigid even at higher frequencies, and the common speaker cone design is pretty good at that. The reason for the orientation is that the voice coil needs to be in the magnetic gap while also driving the cone. Usually the voice coil former is glued to the inside of the cone neck, and this common orientation keeps the size and mass of the moving assembly low (which maximizes SPL as well). The concept of sound needing to come from a single "point source" is important when designing systems with multiple transducers. Often times you'll see loudspeakers with a high-frequency driver embedded at the center of a low-frequency driver, and yes this definitely improves the sonic image!
The 3 most straightforward ways to increase sensitivity are 1) increase the area of the diaphragm 2) decrease the mass of the moving assembly and 3) increase the force factor Bl, which is the magnetic flux density in the voice coil gap times the length of the voice coil wire. Force factor and mass have a frequency-dependent effect on SPL whereas the diaphragm area affects all frequencies the same (assuming perfect linearity). The shape of the cone can drastically affect its strength. A stronger cone is more likely to act like a piston (meaning every point on the cone experiences the exact same displacement), and will therefore respond in a linear way to the input signal. A weaker cone will start to flop around at higher frequencies (different points on the cone experience different displacements), which is a non-linear response to the input signal. You can hear these non-linearities in the form of harmonic distortion, known as "breakups".
Fantastic explanation. Always wondered why there weren't more crossovers used. They could then according to frequency, be different materials per frequency. Have ten speakers per cabinet all with a different frequency crossover. I made my own back in the early eighties and could only find three different crossovers to use... Very disappointing while wondering why they weren't more of them, dividing up into more frequencies. Which would create clearer sound albeit depending on the rest of the system. Haven't even looked at crossovers since back then being it was so disappointing. 😐
The issue is that crossovers create distortion and phase shift. In that regard, less is actually more. That is why we have 2-way designs. It isn't just a cost-saving thing. The problem there is that the drivers don't usually cover the entire frequency range easily. Designers have a tough job. A lot of trading bad for bad going on. It becomes a decision as to what is worse in that instance.
Active crossovers fix the issue of passive crossover non-ideality, but you start to need rather a lot of power amplifiers - 3-way is probably enough - you want to keep each size of driver from encountering frequencies that cause break-up or phase-cancellation of the driver those frequencies are intended for.
There is the issue of the waveforms, not all coming from the same space as well. It isn't just a time thing. Tannoy used to use the analogy of ripples on the water when you drop a stone into it. You see how even they are when there is one stone but when you drop 2 as they can't occupy the same space at the same time the ripples inevitably end up deformed even if they impact the water at exactly the same time. As it was all still really theoretical at that point I don't think they really understood how much of that upevil was caused by the drivers not being in time. We can fix that now but as the sources are still different we still have measurable annomalies.
I do find I like speakers with Kevlar & Carbon Fiber based woofers more pleasing than paper, plastic, or metal. Hemp seems interesting however I havent heard a hemp woofer as of yet.
In the 80s SONY launched these APM speakers, which are a flat panel of an aluminium honey combs. It is very light, and the sound from the woofer is great. Just wonder why theybare not anymore used....
Out of curiosity Tang Band's W8-2145 shows a virtually flat frequency response until about 9-10kHz on their measurements. It supposedly made out of bamboo something? Is it paper but the paper came out of bamboo? It also has a whizzer cone, which I assume takes over after a certain frequency and gives it a better off axis response above 1kHz than a standard 8" driver. Do you all think I'd like to use this as the midbass/midrange driver in the $100 mark? That being said however I am trusting their own measurements so this may be a bad idea. Tang Band also doesn't measure off axis response. I'm merely assuming the whizzer cone improves off axis response above 1kHz.
I like Paper cones for the natural sound but they don't do high volumes as well as other materials and of course a fabric/silk dome tweeter always sounds nice but not super loud either, my car subwoofer is a Focal made of Polypropylene but it needs to be super tough I have 1000 watts going through it , I think a paper cone would distort and shred itself of the same size
One of my pet subjects ... plain Kevlar is the best for mid range drivers with a phase plug . "Oil canning " I always thought was the undesirable effect you get with sealed enclosure LF drivers ... think of adiabatic index ... P1/V1 and non symmetrical excursion of the cone ..
For the most part and most of us it is a bad thing but in instrumental applications, the smear and distortion effects it creates are often desirable. Kevlar is interesting. Focal does that in some of their higher end 3-way car audio stuff. It is actually aramid fibre which I am told is only very slightly different and I have the 2-way set in my car. The high-frequency driver hates 4 Khz. I heard a woven carbon fibre dome mid recently and it rocked!
Yamamura Churchill exhibited a bamboo pulp paper loudspeaker back in 1998 - has a very gorgeous and realistic sounding midband, but priced just too expensive for me. Other well designed paper, aerogel and kevlar types offer a better value for money for 90 % of the performance.
Like every thing else in speaker design, I would guess that choice of cone material involves a set of compromises. I suspect that no one cone material is superior to all others in all considerations, not just tonal character, but lightness, stiffness, resonance tendency, etc.
Wow i never know that soo many types of materials can be used to create a speaker cone, i always tout that the housing of the speaker matters alot in wich material was used. Trough i did know that small & big cones do matter in terms of frequencies and the volume level,but not that, mmm.
The kevlar resonates better imo. That being said it certainly does not have the punch of the paper. Idk though ive never heard/seen a large kevlar cone. I have a hard time deciding between the jbl 4412 and the B&w 640. I l swap based music selection as follows. you want rock JBL you want easy listening B&W.
I have always wondered how one speaker, lets say the one Paul speaks of, working from 50-800Hz, can produce all the frequencies required of it at the same time. Do different parts of the cone vibrate at different frequencies simultaneously?
What is an orajel speaker cone? What does its cross section look like? I saw a cross section of a cone that had another cone behind the front cone. It looked like a spider web between them, and the assembly was incredibly light and yet strong. Is this an orajel cone? thanks.
I made a cone out of scratch lottery tickets and cloth from an old pair of pants and glue,! that woofer bumps hard now even better than the factory woofer that is still good in the other speaker!
What is the reason for drivers that do the exact opposite of what you say -- specifically, soft dome, fabric tweeters? (BTW, I'm not criticizing; my primary speakers use silk domes...just wondering)
Gary Karlin silk dome use for damping properties High mass stiff material hard to control damp at high frequency and Dome use to give structural strength to soft silk.
Innocent soul I understand, but it still seems to me that a soft dome would still break up =distortion ... more than a stiffer metal diaphragm. Is there a hard choice between good damping and good (low) breakup?
IMO, Kelvar is one of the more undesirable cone material due to the "sctratchy" sound it produces. I'm actually surprised its not a more common complaint especially since Kevlar drivers are used in some very expensive speakers. I suppose its a subtle problem and every material has it drawbacks, but I hear it in both B&W and Quads that use Kevlar drivers.
terry...kevlar is an unforgiving but accurate material. if there's a flaw in the chain...it will uncover it in an unforgiving fashion. much like titanium h.f.drivers. silk h.f. driver...very forgiving. titanium....dreadfully unforgiving. clean,accurate power is the order of the day for such materials.that isn't a budget friendly proposition to be sure.
I don’t think the problem is with its unforgiving nature. I think the problem lies in the fact that the cones are made from woven Kevlar strips/fiber that, when they vibrate, produce a self-abrading resonance that result in an audibly scratchy sound. Its subtle, but I can hear it on certain passages of music with the handful of the existing Kevlar drivers I have heard. Those same passages when played on highly resolving speakers (like Focals that have the W composite woofers) sound clear and resolved without the scratchiness.
Gizmo Thewytchdoktor sometimes I think that these unforgiving and revealing speakers /drivers are just sounding good when you don't excite their problems. Some songs just don't excite resonant problems, others will by nature of content. It seems you either go heavy material for less resonance and clean but heavier, less dynamic sound, or you go for the lightweight dynamic and transient sound that will have resonance in some way or another that gets to you. The struggle is finding a compromise imo. Some people can live with the shortcomings of livelier drivers and hate the heavy boxy sound, some like very little resonance peaks, others try to get the balance of both. And then there's people who just like a certain colouration of the sound that is pleasing to the ear. For HiFi listening, get something you like. For studio, get something that translates and that you can live with wrt sound. No point getting a revealing monitor if it also grates your ears.
A good high end speaker will comprise of a Woofer, Borker and a Squeaker. Some cheaper alternatives can comprise of only a Woofer and Squeaker and will do their best to imitate the Bork.
paper....in a stage rig. combo heads and stacks. past that...i always use alternatives for reproduction. creating and reproducing sound are to separate things. this requires different compounds.
Why paper in a stage rig? Like stage monitors or instrument amps? I can't count the number of times I have seen old JBL drivers with paper (reinforced) cones that have "shit the bed". Not to mention never sounded good in their prescribed application. Aside from the fact that paper flexes a ton causing massive unintelligibility issues it is also usually used as the low driver in a 2-way monitor (2 way to maximise intelligibility. Crossovers create phase shift and distortion) and in that case in order for it to go low enough and loud enough has to be a bigger driver. It can't usually go high enough to mate with the high-frequency driver well. I have yet to hear a high SPL, high-frequency driver that sounds smooth at 1500 Hz. Kevlar is kinda good for that. Fibreglass is more common though.
Instrument amps are a different thing. The flexing is part of the sound of the instrument. That said there are a lot of variations on driver designs there too.
USE whatever you like, because the sound is determined by the crossover network built into the speakers ? I have seen paper cone speakers from 30+ years ago on yamaha NS 1000 / JAMO Power range / JBL 45 series etc series which are still going strong and sound better than most new plastic or kevlar type speakers,why because its the cross over network which needs to be upgraded and also new quality speaker materials, get them both based on the type of music you want to listen too and lets not forget that most people will not have any music that load like at the concert of Van halen or metalica or a classical music concert full stop ?f
You’d think by now that there would be a consensus on what is the best cone material, money no object, and then it was simply a question of how close your budget speakers come to that. I guess the truth is that there is no ‘perfect’ cone material and that there are trade offs as in all engineering choices. Curiously the ‘British sound’ was probably all made by 1960s and 1970s paper cones. The more recent trend to great accuracy hi-res sound might have led the call for stiffer cones.
Good information, but you didn't really answer the question in the context that he meant it. I think he wanted to knowz for example, paper sounding warm and relaxed while ceramic is brighter and detailed
Do speaker cones fatigue and lose stiffness over time? I would think after vibrating any material a few billion times it loses its original property. I know aluminum and carbon bikes fatigue over time.
Yup. In pro audio re-coning is a regular part of the maintenance process. Drivers are worked as hard as they can day in and day out. If they don't die from abuse they eventually sound so different (mostly bad) from their like parts either in the same cabinets or like cabinets that we just have to re-cone them anyway. Common is subs that "fart" at higher output levels. The cones test and look fine but when you hit em they sound broken. Funny thing I have 2 sets of studio monitors from the 90's. I am sure they have not really seen any abusive level run through them so that could be a factor but all 4 sound pretty close to one another still and I was afraid I was going to have to have a friend re-engineer the drivers as re-cone kits are now unavailable for them.
Anyone can tell the difference between an instrument made of wood and other made of plastic or metal, but for some unknown reason when it comes to drivers and speakers almost no one is aware of it. Musicians now by heart the sound difference in materials. A string made of flesh sounds pretty different form a metal one. And a metal guitar o violin will have a very particular tone, very different from a wood or plastic one. Same goes for cones. I really hate plastic cones they have an artificial sound, metal can be pretty harsh in particular for voices. Metal tweeters are extremely incisive, they drill your ears and brain till you bleed, except for ribbons which can sound great. For my taste paper and wood fibre (paper comes from wood and are pretty similar) sound best. For tweeters silk is my favorite. That is the secret sauce that makes the difference between brands as Focal, DALI, Triangle,Tannoy, etc It's amazing how different speakers from different brands can sound despite having almost identical specs, my conclusion is that the difference is in cone material and the quality of the crossover parts. As always something is gain something is lost, there is not such thing as the perfect material. But natural materials seem to sound better than artificial ones, maybe it has been embedded in our genes in the millions of years we have been doing music and instruments with them.
Hmm. I can't speak for DALI and Triangle but both Focal and Tannoy are near and dear to my heart. Tannoy in the home market only uses paper cones for low drivers but in their high res studio monitors where accuracy and hyper intelligibility rule paper is not even an option on the board. Only the cheaper Tannoy monitors used silk dome tweeters and for the most part, theirs were Titanium. Actually since Behringer (now call "Music Group" bought them a few years back Tannoy dropped their dual concentric line of studio monitors and only make their cheap ones now. Maybe they have changed metals most recently. Focal uses and has for as long as I remember ZERO paper anything and their high-frequency drivers are mostly metal as well. I have a pair of Focal in my car that are Aramid fibre and yes I found that they resonate strangely compared to other drivers and it took me some time to tune (DSP) out the bothersome tones but I have to tell you there are no silk dome tweeters that can reproduce detail on that level and now that they are set up well they sound really good all be it a bit edgy and not quite as airy as I would like them to be. They can't do 20Khz. That said neither can most silk drivers either. The whole point of using different materials is to get closer to speakers becoming inaudible. Our old ways are just that. Paper and silk were materials used to make speakers since almost the beginning. Engineers have revisited them and tweaked them a thousand times. We just can't get any more out of them. Paper and silk have their own sounds too but because they are "HOW SPEAKERS ARE MADE!" many people find them inaudible. I assure you they are completely audible which makes them equally suspect. The fact that their comparative performance is now lagging so much behind all of the more recent designs has pretty much sealed their fate. I know this might make you feel bad but honestly, they are obsolete techs. Look at all of the top speakers available today. The best rated. Nevermind what you and I say here. "The People" are not idiots and are not deaf. What do they say is the best? Focal Grande Utopia tops almost every list I have seen for years. No paper and no silk. In fact, go down the list. Infinity IRS? Magnaplanner? It's pretty clear. They are your speakers and you can do what you like. It is like owning an old car. "It is a classic". Yup, but time marches on and we do learn new things. Contrary to what people say we do learn how to make things better over time too. Cars used to rust out in a couple of years in Canada. Now we don't see rust for over 10 years.
jfbaquero i have metal ( ceramic coated aluminium) woofers and same ribbon tweeters in my Monitor audio speakers. Voices sounds way way better than on my previous Dali with paper woofers. Metal drivers dont sounds bad, its bullshit
Why not use copper screws? Gold plating steel screw is a waste of money and those screws have big loses of energy because gold layer is extremely thin so power goes mostly through steel which has bad electricity conducting properties.
gold doesn't corrode so in fifteen years there isnt a wad of copper oxide and iron oxide at a connection which will decrease sound quality or cause it to not work at all
@@timthepoolman3313 you would have to keep it in a very damp basement or something to make copper corrode so badly. I've never seen copper corroded at all in normal household application. Gold plating is just an audio-voodoo for audio-voodoo fanatics. You can sell them gold plated steel or even gold plated shit and they will still think it can conduct better through that thin layer than entire thing made out of copper.
We have a house on the water and the salt in the air oxidizes everything at my house also I own a swimming pool service company and i have a stereo in my chemical storage building full of chlorine
Kevlar - there is no difference in the deformation diagram (action and reaction), but .... the stiffness of the metal and the ceramics, but... the agility of the plastic, but... the universality of carbon fibers, but ... nano technology, but ... at the end, the good old paper is still... perhaps... the best. Maybe attention to flax (linen) fibers... the same vegetable origin as cellulose... Long lived vegetarians... pardon Paul, naturists!
Gold is used to reduce oxidisation of the contact. Gold is fantastic for transfering heat, it is not the best for conducting electricity, For that you need to look at copper unfortunatley copper just loves to oxidise.
@Dave Micolichek Ya, when it comes to speakers we are really still futzing with Epoxy resin as a binder regardless of the other components. BTW there is "fiberglass" and "Glass Fiber". To this day I am trying to figure how they are actually not the same material other than how they are set up. By that I mean fiberglass is actually just the resin and the glass fibers mixed together usually where in terms of what Infinity refers to as "Glass Fiber" it is a woven mat which contains some amount of binder somewhere but in the case of my sub in my car the resin is not visible to the naked eye.
I guess someone has already tried it. There is a third factor Paul didn't mention. Some materials tend to swing (a little like a bell) May be that is a problem. If it is a suitable material we will see a lot of drivers with that material in the near future.
as for woofers..paper always sounds best, it gives a more "human" sound, sweeter, aluminum can be close if well designed, but not quite up to par with paper..plastic sounds the least pleasing ,and tends to soften around the point where the column is glued to the cone causing wave form distotion
There is a (theoretically but practically not so much) sad truth about all drivers aspiring to act like true pistons: NONE OF THEM IS A PERFECT PISTON! Some may truly claim so for a (usually narrow) part of the frequency spectrum but, in general, all dynamic drivers are A COMBINATION of a PISTONIC DRIVER and a BENDING WAVE DRIVER. Some of them evolved towards the other side of the functional spectrum and proudly became (or claim so) pure bending wave drivers. These last ones are the incarnation of the hope that, yes, we can make great sounding dynamic drivers, even though they may not be perfect pistons! The next wonderful thing that comes after this realization, is that we can finally return to the good, old, for-millions-of-years-of-evolution-beloved-by-our-ears WOOD (or paper, or cellulose, it's the same thing). In my opinion, PAPER (or wood) has so many advantages as a cone material that it's a sin for a loudspeaker developer to ignore. It's no coincidense that the only truly wide range (and decently to greatly sounding) dynamic drivers have (guess what)... paper cones! (Well, perhaps domes is a little different story but domes never intended to be really wide-rangers). Cones and domes made of diverse materials are a by-product of the odyssey of loudspeaker designers who decided to take the path of dividing the reproduction of the audible spectrum to various different drivers. Various cone materials were recruited in compensation for the disadvantages this initial decision imparted to their products. Some (few) of them were very successful, nevertheless.
" It's no coincidense that the only truly wide range (and decently to greatly sounding) dynamic drivers have (guess what)... paper cones!" Of course, this is why the top 5 rated speakers in the world today all use "paper cones"? WRONG!!!
Exposure. This is the first I have ever heard of them. I see there are zero distributors in North America. I see as a manufacturer they have focused on home audio only and in keeping with standard North American home audio theory that "there could not possibly be anything better than what we already have" (like paper cones) Manger would have a very hard time gaining any traction here. Now, that said not everyone here is so arrogant to think that we own the rights to all of the knowledge. Focal has been gaining a lot of traction but I think it is because the old guard just can't bamboozle us their lies and half-truths any longer. Of course Focal is French which for some stupid reason I don't understand makes them more acceptable than if they were from many other countries. My instinct says it is a racism thing and as a Canadian, is yet another source of great embarrassment and shame. The good news as we uncover all of these wells of woeful acts we do sort through them. In my country, we mean that we do not wish to judge people like that. We will leave that for the judge and jury to figure out. In looking at their stuff it appears that they often use a conventional cone in conjunction with their driver. Is that an indicator that they are not so good in the lower register. I also see that they are not particularly powerful so high SPL applications would not be an application where we could use them at this point. What is the word on what they sound like? Are they super clinical? I find that people often dislike hyper-accuracy and often desire something that generates a more smeared image. I think that is just because that is what they are used to. It is kinda like analogue video vs 4K. There is no question that 4K is so much better of a picture but the odd guy still rants about their old blurred out analogue Betacam crap.
you never come across ruind paper cones at all ? paper stronger than plastic ? I will leave you to it . Even Headphones are all made of plastic now not paper as they did but never mind
Does anyone know of carbon-fiber being used? DOE! Never mind - always google first. I found Sonus Faber EXTREMA speakers that are way overpriced @ $100,000 for a bookshelf speaker that may sound 2% better than my B&W CM1's - So much snake oil in this industry.
Funny i watched this video just 2 see what u would say about aluminum...and it was the dead last words out your mouth lol...In my car ive been running different aluminum subs since 2003...But in home I been using un and treated paper my whole life...I hate polys and Plastics they sound like beating on Rubbermaid trashcans!
Hi Paul, you didnt really answer the question. I watched a different video by Audioholics which answered the question much better. Different materials DO make a difference in the sound of a speaker driver. Paper was good in many situations. Metal was usually the worst.
I could listen to Paul talk all day.
You all prolly dont care at all but does anybody know a method to log back into an instagram account??
I somehow forgot my login password. I would appreciate any tricks you can offer me.
@Emmett Matthias instablaster =)
In my 40 years of making my own LF and LMF cones I have found that treated pulp produces the best overall tone and provides superior damping. Coatings can range from polymers to aquaplas depending on the frequency range you are trying to reproduce. For very LF (below 300hz) Aquaplas or a semi-soft polymer works best for me while for low-mid a polymer coating similar to that used by KEF works best.To improve piston linearity the coating should be somewhat thicker to the center of the cone. Have also found that thinner pulp is better for mid's as they require less damping and require more detail. Have had not success getting metal cones to produce a natural sound (lots of detail at the expense of tone). We use two types of coating on mids: one is a stiffening agent and the other is for damping. The damping is never applied uniformly on the cone.
mike young Thanks for sharing! Would love to find some content online which speaks on this process. Either reading or videos if you know any would be lovely, have a great day!
Joke: Poly cone
Broke: Aluminium cone
50% woke: Coated paper cone
150% woke: Bare paper cone
What the hell is "woke"?
Good video, I particularly like how you educate without deciding for people what is best.
I don’t play to bring the house down, but to relax,and for that purpose, I find paper the best.
all my drivers are paper.pioneer cs.
Paper cones are the best actually
@@Synthematix nah electrostats are the best
Some of the nicest sounding speakers are still paper.
@@djshumon Hard to beat paper cones. Some of the best sounding speakers .
Thank you very much for existing
Paper for woofers, paper or silk for midrange and silk or mylar for tweeters. Nothing else comes close for the perfect tone. Metal drivers for the most part sound too piercing, not the soft sound that I prefer.
Other parts of a speaker including the spider, surround, and even the basket also contribute to the sound of the speaker. The electrical resistance of the coil increases as the coil heats up, coloring the sound even more.
Exactly. Cone isn't all that matters
I have a pair of Vintage Zenith 49cz852's and they sound absolutely stunning. They are 12" and are made of felted paper. They have 3/4" voice coil with vintage enamel wire, and a ribbed cone. The sound is just stunning. The clarity, dynamics, imaging, and timbre is unlike anything I've ever heard. I don't think by modern standards they have the best properties but they sound just mind blowing and thats what matters. I run them full range in an open baffle and they can play down to 80hz and up to 14Khz. I add a tweeter with a 1 uf cap to accentuate the highs.
Hi Paul, you forgot to mention a third important property: inner damping, how good the material suppresses resonances. But it is often opposing stiffness. The German DIY loudspeaker magazine Hobby HiFi recently showed that cone material is not the most important thing in a speaker. Mechanical losses that immensely affect sound quality are predominantly caused by a lossy suspension and voice coil former materials.
My speakers are paper cone woofer, cloth dome tweeter and aluminium foil coffee can seal for the pointy triangular whizzer piece added to the tweeter. It's an isosceles triangular piece about a half inch long glued to the tweeter dome. The whizzer makes the treble sound amazing, and you can hear the "shing" in the aluminum but it's quite pleasant and the cymbals sound like metal and sound like they are being "hit" instead of sounding like a "hissing air hose" (like the tweeters sounded like originally). (Whizzers designed by trial&error.)
For dome tweeters, Beryllium is the best you can get and diamond dome tweeters are a close second. Beryllium dome tweeters resonate very well above the human hearing range. For a midrange or a mid-woofer paper, kevlar, or carbon fiber are excellent materials. For a woofer, paper, carbon fiber, or polypropylene are excellent materials.
That what I've got for my speaker project monacor carbon fiber 6.5 drive for woofer b&w 6.5 kevlar for mid an a fountek ribbon for tweeter the magnet on the monacor is 6 inch nice drivers.they go low for a 6.5
Paper . EG....some of the vintage JBL and Altec paper cones sound very nice indeed.
I loved my model 3’s.
I have some JBL 4311s, great sound from those cones, better than the poorly set up $30,000 Focals I had access to a while back. Focals might be awesome properly integrated, I never had the option to do that with them 😭
Beside structural integrity, diaphragm materials are also chosen for their timbre sound quality. This is why two drivers with different cone materials can have the same breakup frequency but will not sound the same. Each material has its flavor aside from measurements.
Besides sound quality..endurance and durability.. resistance to humidity.. and lastly..something that glue will stick to.
Car audio and outdoor speakers use materials that work in wide temp ..humidity..and sunlight.
Paul, you are very astute with presenting explanations in a way we can all understand!
Bravo! You are bringing so many others along so that we may all benefit from your knowledge. Much appreciated!
Pistonic drivers are not optimal.
To have flat frequency response at all angles, the radiating surface area has to change size inversely to frequency. The beam angle of radiation depends on the ratio of wavelength to circumference of the cone or dome. This is one reason we have two, three and even five way speakers. If you look at the off-axis response, you will see that the projection angle narrows just below the crossover points where the woofer and midrange drivers are large in relation to the wavelength, causing adverse room interactions from the peaks and dips.
Musical instrument design takes this into account. For example, in the violin family there is a small area of the sound board under the bridge and between the f shaped holes which radiates the treble frequencies, scaled to the size of violin, viola, cello and contrabass. The larger carved areas of the sound board upper and lower bouts are progressively more flexible and radiate lower frequencies.
A loudspeaker diaphragm in a curvilinear shape with the right flexure and damping parameters can produce the same affect, of an effective shrinking of diameter with increasing frequency. I use a 15" driver with a 2" voice coil that has a rising response up to 5KHz, with an effective diameter around 5" at the top of the range and low end response to 30Hz.
A well damped cone also lowers temporal distortion, making sure the notes stop as fast as the recorded signal. This flexure lowers the effective mass at high frequencies, and therefore the energy storage is lower.
the very best bass reproduction I have ever heard in a woofer is the JBL L100S from the 70s..what a deep and sweet sounding woofer..made from paper, with some strange rough sandpaper material on the outside..no doubt clumsy and slow, but somehow they got it almost perfect
i have always assumed that , rather than trying to adhere to the ideal of perfect cone stiffness and inevitably failing, the higher end drivers are subtly designed to intentionally flex at different frequencies in a controlled manner, in order to have more control over the sound output
Go look at bmr drivers. Being used in the philharmonic speakers to GREAT effect.
Thanks for actually answering the original question. I have A one off special production run of Aluminium cone 5" woofers. So far I have not heard anything that beats them. And I also agree that paper cones present music nicely. Even paper tweeters.
pioneer cs ,all my drivers are paper.they sound natural as I have used many speakers over the years.
I seem to always like treated paper the most. I'm currently enjoying some very inexpensive Sony bookshelf speakers with mica impregnated paper drivers. They just sound very good with my amplifier from the mid 70s.
Good question. Paper was the only material for decades, but in the late 80's all kinds of materials were used. From poly propelene, to fiberglass to Kevlar to aluminum to paper. And the material the surrounds were made of differed as well. silver Flute speakers use wool, strange as that might seem, but reports say that they are very articulate and provide good detail. In car speakers there have been several exotic materials used. What we need is a transparent, neutral sounding material that doesn't impart any quality of its own into the music being played through it. It seems funny then when good old paper cones still have their niche in speaker cones. Some of the best drivers made then and now use paper. I've got a pair of silver Flute drivers that I bought for my car, but it turns out I didn't need them, so I'm looking for a design to use them at home with. I think they would work great in a D'Appolito arangement for a computer, or home studio type speaker. Coupled with a tweeter that can be used below 2500hz they should sound awesome! I'm looking at the new GRS Ribbon tweeters to go with them. We'll see how that works out!
Great Video! Just like all the others! Seriously, I think your such a cool guy for taking time from your family and life for doing this for us! I have learned so much from you!
It's called softsell marketing pal.
Great information! Thanks for some real insights into the nuts and bolts of speaker design.
Good introductory explanation
The Harder the material the better it resonates High Frequencies, the Softer it resonates Low Frequencies. Paper or compressed paper cones have the most Natural Sound. Some materials like Poly carbonates and Aluminium' though they are harder, they can be driven with more bass to compensate because they are stronger' though there is a limit before the material vibrates and becomes audible. Aluminium speakers can be made small and handle a large amount of bass. The best speaker arrangement is to balance 5 way components with a big enough sub woofer so that the other frequencies are balanced, woofer, mid range, tweeter and super tweeter and have harder materials for high frequencies such as Titanium Alloy Tweeters and Super Tweeters, then have a variety of other materials for the other speakers to get a balanced sound rather than thinking that there is one ultimate material. All have their positive and negative attributes. Paper tares easily and flaps, Metallic can sound metallic at high volume.
Now that's about as thorough of an explanation you can get.
I can understand the desire for the 'unobtainium' zero mass, infinite rigidity material for a speaker cone so that it can follow the electrical signal as perfectly as possible.
What I don't understand is the most common 'shape' of speaker cones. I mean, that I understand it from a rigidity standpoint, but not from an orientation standpoint.
Since one is (assumedly) trying to "imitate" a "point source" wouldn't a cone facing the opposite direction (or a partial hemisphere, as in many tweeters and some midranges) present better physics for that? Could that possibly increase the accuracy of the sound field generated in the midrange?
Thanks for the interesting topics, Paul. I may not agree with all of your points in all of your videos, but you always give me something to think about - and possibly a totally different viewpoint to consider.
Take care!
The sensitivity of a speaker (i.e. loudness) is highly dependent on the area of the diaphragm - you actually want as large an area as you can get to push the most air! Theoretically any shape could work, but to maximize linearity and lower the harmonic distortion, you need something that is rigid even at higher frequencies, and the common speaker cone design is pretty good at that. The reason for the orientation is that the voice coil needs to be in the magnetic gap while also driving the cone. Usually the voice coil former is glued to the inside of the cone neck, and this common orientation keeps the size and mass of the moving assembly low (which maximizes SPL as well).
The concept of sound needing to come from a single "point source" is important when designing systems with multiple transducers. Often times you'll see loudspeakers with a high-frequency driver embedded at the center of a low-frequency driver, and yes this definitely improves the sonic image!
What makes a speaker to be more sensitive ? To have higher SPL per meter.
Also how different shaped cones affect sound ?
The 3 most straightforward ways to increase sensitivity are 1) increase the area of the diaphragm 2) decrease the mass of the moving assembly and 3) increase the force factor Bl, which is the magnetic flux density in the voice coil gap times the length of the voice coil wire. Force factor and mass have a frequency-dependent effect on SPL whereas the diaphragm area affects all frequencies the same (assuming perfect linearity).
The shape of the cone can drastically affect its strength. A stronger cone is more likely to act like a piston (meaning every point on the cone experiences the exact same displacement), and will therefore respond in a linear way to the input signal. A weaker cone will start to flop around at higher frequencies (different points on the cone experience different displacements), which is a non-linear response to the input signal. You can hear these non-linearities in the form of harmonic distortion, known as "breakups".
Fantastic explanation.
Always wondered why there weren't more crossovers used.
They could then according to frequency, be different materials per frequency.
Have ten speakers per cabinet all with a different frequency crossover.
I made my own back in the early eighties and could only find three different crossovers to use...
Very disappointing while wondering why they weren't more of them, dividing up into more frequencies. Which would create clearer sound albeit depending on the rest of the system.
Haven't even looked at crossovers since back then being it was so disappointing. 😐
I don't think there's much point going above 4-way (subwoofer, midwoofer, squawker, tweeter)
The issue is that crossovers create distortion and phase shift. In that regard, less is actually more. That is why we have 2-way designs. It isn't just a cost-saving thing. The problem there is that the drivers don't usually cover the entire frequency range easily. Designers have a tough job. A lot of trading bad for bad going on. It becomes a decision as to what is worse in that instance.
Active crossovers fix the issue of passive crossover non-ideality, but you start to need rather a lot of power amplifiers - 3-way is probably enough - you want to keep each size of driver from encountering frequencies that cause break-up or phase-cancellation of the driver those frequencies are intended for.
There is the issue of the waveforms, not all coming from the same space as well. It isn't just a time thing. Tannoy used to use the analogy of ripples on the water when you drop a stone into it. You see how even they are when there is one stone but when you drop 2 as they can't occupy the same space at the same time the ripples inevitably end up deformed even if they impact the water at exactly the same time. As it was all still really theoretical at that point I don't think they really understood how much of that upevil was caused by the drivers not being in time. We can fix that now but as the sources are still different we still have measurable annomalies.
7:39 its the best part
Gold? I wouldn't settle for less than osmium! :D
I have a pair of Focal speakers with berrillium tweeters. What is your opinion of that material?
I do find I like speakers with Kevlar & Carbon Fiber based woofers more pleasing than paper, plastic, or metal. Hemp seems interesting however I havent heard a hemp woofer as of yet.
In the 80s SONY launched these APM speakers, which are a flat panel of an aluminium honey combs. It is very light, and the sound from the woofer is great. Just wonder why theybare not anymore used....
Out of curiosity Tang Band's W8-2145 shows a virtually flat frequency response until about 9-10kHz on their measurements.
It supposedly made out of bamboo something? Is it paper but the paper came out of bamboo?
It also has a whizzer cone, which I assume takes over after a certain frequency and gives it a better off axis response above 1kHz than a standard 8" driver.
Do you all think I'd like to use this as the midbass/midrange driver in the $100 mark?
That being said however I am trusting their own measurements so this may be a bad idea. Tang Band also doesn't measure off axis response. I'm merely assuming the whizzer cone improves off axis response above 1kHz.
I like Paper cones for the natural sound but they don't do high volumes as well as other materials and of course a fabric/silk dome tweeter always sounds nice but not super loud either, my car subwoofer is a Focal made of Polypropylene but it needs to be super tough I have 1000 watts going through it , I think a paper cone would distort and shred itself of the same size
Well no shit
One of my pet subjects ... plain Kevlar is the best for mid range drivers with a phase plug .
"Oil canning " I always thought was the undesirable effect you get with sealed enclosure LF drivers ... think of adiabatic index ... P1/V1 and non symmetrical excursion of the cone ..
For the most part and most of us it is a bad thing but in instrumental applications, the smear and distortion effects it creates are often desirable.
Kevlar is interesting. Focal does that in some of their higher end 3-way car audio stuff. It is actually aramid fibre which I am told is only very slightly different and I have the 2-way set in my car. The high-frequency driver hates 4 Khz. I heard a woven carbon fibre dome mid recently and it rocked!
Yamamura Churchill exhibited a bamboo pulp paper loudspeaker back in 1998 - has a very gorgeous and realistic sounding midband, but priced just too expensive for me. Other well designed paper, aerogel and kevlar types offer a better value for money for 90 % of the performance.
A question about cone material turned into a stealth advertisement for your companies products.
Like every thing else in speaker design, I would guess that choice of cone material involves a set of compromises. I suspect that no one cone material is superior to all others in all considerations, not just tonal character, but lightness, stiffness, resonance tendency, etc.
Wow i never know that soo many types of materials can be used to create a speaker cone, i always tout that the housing of the speaker matters alot in wich material was used.
Trough i did know that small & big cones do matter in terms of frequencies and the volume level,but not that, mmm.
The kevlar resonates better imo. That being said it certainly does not have the punch of the paper. Idk though ive never heard/seen a large kevlar cone. I have a hard time deciding between the jbl 4412 and the B&w 640. I l swap based music selection as follows. you want rock JBL you want easy listening B&W.
another good method would be using a tig welding torch gently to solder tig is a very precise form of welding
I guess I have the copper spun polymer cone by Klipsch. It gives off a tight sound.
I have always wondered how one speaker, lets say the one Paul speaks of, working from 50-800Hz, can produce all the frequencies required of it at the same time. Do different parts of the cone vibrate at different frequencies simultaneously?
Thanks for reading my question.
Scott Hartman Yeah, I wish you could thank him for answering it.
Trial and error with a dash of marketing hype is what speakers are made of.
What is an orajel speaker cone? What does its cross section look like? I saw a cross section of a cone that had another cone behind the front cone. It looked like a spider web between them, and the assembly was incredibly light and yet strong. Is this an orajel cone?
thanks.
Paper cones can be a bit soft , Plastic gives better detail , you can stiffen paper but it can be risky
THATS CORRECT, i am taking that kind of risk, applying a couple of layers of resin. at the time, i have good results
sometimes plastic cones can ring
All cones ring, some ring worse than others. Hard thick cones are worse for ringing.
Have soft ones then
As Peter says, there's nothing stiffer and lighter than paper!
th-cam.com/video/Xz45IYZQMf0/w-d-xo.html
Would carbon fibre be a good fit? low mass and extremly stiff and strong
I made a cone out of scratch lottery tickets and cloth from an old pair of pants and glue,! that woofer bumps hard now even better than the factory woofer that is still good in the other speaker!
ı wanted work with you sir :) you are the best.
What is the reason for drivers that do the exact opposite of what you say -- specifically, soft dome, fabric tweeters? (BTW, I'm not criticizing; my primary speakers use silk domes...just wondering)
Gary Karlin silk dome use for damping properties
High mass stiff material hard to control damp at high frequency and
Dome use to give structural strength to soft silk.
Innocent soul I understand, but it still seems to me that a soft dome would still break up =distortion ... more than a stiffer metal diaphragm. Is there a hard choice between good damping and good (low) breakup?
Sounds like graphene reinforced titanium might meet the desired specs well.
IMO, Kelvar is one of the more undesirable cone material due to the "sctratchy" sound it produces. I'm actually surprised its not a more common complaint especially since Kevlar drivers are used in some very expensive speakers. I suppose its a subtle problem and every material has it drawbacks, but I hear it in both B&W and Quads that use Kevlar drivers.
terrywho22 - Yes! Once upon a time I had installed Blaupunkt kevlar speakers in my car and it was the worst mistake.
Nikhil Gee - Thanks, glad to read that I'm not the only one!
terry...kevlar is an unforgiving but accurate material. if there's a flaw in the chain...it will uncover it in an unforgiving fashion. much like titanium h.f.drivers. silk h.f. driver...very forgiving. titanium....dreadfully unforgiving. clean,accurate power is the order of the day for such materials.that isn't a budget friendly proposition to be sure.
I don’t think the problem is with its unforgiving nature. I think the problem lies in the fact that the cones are made from woven Kevlar strips/fiber that, when they vibrate, produce a self-abrading resonance that result in an audibly scratchy sound. Its subtle, but I can hear it on certain passages of music with the handful of the existing Kevlar drivers I have heard. Those same passages when played on highly resolving speakers (like Focals that have the W composite woofers) sound clear and resolved without the scratchiness.
Gizmo Thewytchdoktor sometimes I think that these unforgiving and revealing speakers /drivers are just sounding good when you don't excite their problems. Some songs just don't excite resonant problems, others will by nature of content.
It seems you either go heavy material for less resonance and clean but heavier, less dynamic sound, or you go for the lightweight dynamic and transient sound that will have resonance in some way or another that gets to you.
The struggle is finding a compromise imo. Some people can live with the shortcomings of livelier drivers and hate the heavy boxy sound, some like very little resonance peaks, others try to get the balance of both. And then there's people who just like a certain colouration of the sound that is pleasing to the ear.
For HiFi listening, get something you like.
For studio, get something that translates and that you can live with wrt sound. No point getting a revealing monitor if it also grates your ears.
2:53
Wood! I've seen it.
I'd imagine balsa as a flat panel might be quite good, light, stiff...
4:01 But we have to pay for it.
A good high end speaker will comprise of a Woofer, Borker and a Squeaker. Some cheaper alternatives can comprise of only a Woofer and Squeaker and will do their best to imitate the Bork.
Listen to a set of Tannoy Gold's.
very informative .I loce your channel man.If im ever in the area It would be an honer to meet you and check out your facility`s
Al speakers vibrate use damping if its bad or a better speaker
paper....in a stage rig. combo heads and stacks.
past that...i always use alternatives for reproduction.
creating and reproducing sound are to separate things. this requires different compounds.
Why paper in a stage rig? Like stage monitors or instrument amps? I can't count the number of times I have seen old JBL drivers with paper (reinforced) cones that have "shit the bed". Not to mention never sounded good in their prescribed application. Aside from the fact that paper flexes a ton causing massive unintelligibility issues it is also usually used as the low driver in a 2-way monitor (2 way to maximise intelligibility. Crossovers create phase shift and distortion) and in that case in order for it to go low enough and loud enough has to be a bigger driver. It can't usually go high enough to mate with the high-frequency driver well. I have yet to hear a high SPL, high-frequency driver that sounds smooth at 1500 Hz. Kevlar is kinda good for that. Fibreglass is more common though.
Instrument amps are a different thing. The flexing is part of the sound of the instrument. That said there are a lot of variations on driver designs there too.
hmmmm....something's missing.
I was waiting for you to reply as to where you would use it in a stage rig.
USE whatever you like, because the sound is determined by the crossover network built into the speakers ? I have seen paper cone speakers from 30+ years ago on yamaha NS 1000 / JAMO Power range / JBL 45 series etc series which are still going strong and sound better than most new plastic or kevlar type speakers,why because its the cross over network which needs to be upgraded and also new quality speaker materials, get them both based on the type of music you want to listen too and lets not forget that most people will not have any music that load like at the concert of Van halen or metalica or a classical music concert full stop ?f
You’d think by now that there would be a consensus on what is the best cone material, money no object, and then it was simply a question of how close your budget speakers come to that. I guess the truth is that there is no ‘perfect’ cone material and that there are trade offs as in all engineering choices. Curiously the ‘British sound’ was probably all made by 1960s and 1970s paper cones. The more recent trend to great accuracy hi-res sound might have led the call for stiffer cones.
It's all about breakup modes regardless of material.
Good information, but you didn't really answer the question in the context that he meant it. I think he wanted to knowz for example, paper sounding warm and relaxed while ceramic is brighter and detailed
I use rigid cones in my LRADs. They get the attention of the hobos, due to good transient response.
Do speaker cones fatigue and lose stiffness over time? I would think after vibrating any material a few billion times it loses its original property. I know aluminum and carbon bikes fatigue over time.
Yup. In pro audio re-coning is a regular part of the maintenance process. Drivers are worked as hard as they can day in and day out. If they don't die from abuse they eventually sound so different (mostly bad) from their like parts either in the same cabinets or like cabinets that we just have to re-cone them anyway. Common is subs that "fart" at higher output levels. The cones test and look fine but when you hit em they sound broken.
Funny thing I have 2 sets of studio monitors from the 90's. I am sure they have not really seen any abusive level run through them so that could be a factor but all 4 sound pretty close to one another still and I was afraid I was going to have to have a friend re-engineer the drivers as re-cone kits are now unavailable for them.
You want something stiff and strong, yet very light weight. The obvious best material? Graphene.
Anyone can tell the difference between an instrument made of wood and other made of plastic or metal, but for some unknown reason when it comes to drivers and speakers almost no one is aware of it. Musicians now by heart the sound difference in materials. A string made of flesh sounds pretty different form a metal one. And a metal guitar o violin will have a very particular tone, very different from a wood or plastic one. Same goes for cones. I really hate plastic cones they have an artificial sound, metal can be pretty harsh in particular for voices. Metal tweeters are extremely incisive, they drill your ears and brain till you bleed, except for ribbons which can sound great. For my taste paper and wood fibre (paper comes from wood and are pretty similar) sound best. For tweeters silk is my favorite. That is the secret sauce that makes the difference between brands as Focal, DALI, Triangle,Tannoy, etc It's amazing how different speakers from different brands can sound despite having almost identical specs, my conclusion is that the difference is in cone material and the quality of the crossover parts. As always something is gain something is lost, there is not such thing as the perfect material. But natural materials seem to sound better than artificial ones, maybe it has been embedded in our genes in the millions of years we have been doing music and instruments with them.
Hmm. I can't speak for DALI and Triangle but both Focal and Tannoy are near and dear to my heart. Tannoy in the home market only uses paper cones for low drivers but in their high res studio monitors where accuracy and hyper intelligibility rule paper is not even an option on the board. Only the cheaper Tannoy monitors used silk dome tweeters and for the most part, theirs were Titanium. Actually since Behringer (now call "Music Group" bought them a few years back Tannoy dropped their dual concentric line of studio monitors and only make their cheap ones now. Maybe they have changed metals most recently. Focal uses and has for as long as I remember ZERO paper anything and their high-frequency drivers are mostly metal as well. I have a pair of Focal in my car that are Aramid fibre and yes I found that they resonate strangely compared to other drivers and it took me some time to tune (DSP) out the bothersome tones but I have to tell you there are no silk dome tweeters that can reproduce detail on that level and now that they are set up well they sound really good all be it a bit edgy and not quite as airy as I would like them to be. They can't do 20Khz. That said neither can most silk drivers either.
The whole point of using different materials is to get closer to speakers becoming inaudible. Our old ways are just that. Paper and silk were materials used to make speakers since almost the beginning. Engineers have revisited them and tweaked them a thousand times. We just can't get any more out of them. Paper and silk have their own sounds too but because they are "HOW SPEAKERS ARE MADE!" many people find them inaudible. I assure you they are completely audible which makes them equally suspect. The fact that their comparative performance is now lagging so much behind all of the more recent designs has pretty much sealed their fate. I know this might make you feel bad but honestly, they are obsolete techs. Look at all of the top speakers available today. The best rated. Nevermind what you and I say here. "The People" are not idiots and are not deaf. What do they say is the best? Focal Grande Utopia tops almost every list I have seen for years. No paper and no silk. In fact, go down the list. Infinity IRS? Magnaplanner? It's pretty clear.
They are your speakers and you can do what you like. It is like owning an old car. "It is a classic". Yup, but time marches on and we do learn new things. Contrary to what people say we do learn how to make things better over time too. Cars used to rust out in a couple of years in Canada. Now we don't see rust for over 10 years.
jfbaquero i have metal ( ceramic coated aluminium) woofers and same ribbon tweeters in my Monitor audio speakers. Voices sounds way way better than on my previous Dali with paper woofers. Metal drivers dont sounds bad, its bullshit
Paper for the house, poly for the ride.
Why not use copper screws? Gold plating steel screw is a waste of money and those screws have big loses of energy because gold layer is extremely thin so power goes mostly through steel which has bad electricity conducting properties.
gold doesn't corrode so in fifteen years there isnt a wad of copper oxide and iron oxide at a connection which will decrease sound quality or cause it to not work at all
@@timthepoolman3313 you would have to keep it in a very damp basement or something to make copper corrode so badly. I've never seen copper corroded at all in normal household application. Gold plating is just an audio-voodoo for audio-voodoo fanatics. You can sell them gold plated steel or even gold plated shit and they will still think it can conduct better through that thin layer than entire thing made out of copper.
We have a house on the water and the salt in the air oxidizes everything at my house also I own a swimming pool service company and i have a stereo in my chemical storage building full of chlorine
@@bluef1sh926 we dont have basements here
@@bluef1sh926 im no audiophool dont get me wrong im just saying i see a reason for gold plated stuff
So how do cone materials affect sound?
I absolutely hate the sound of bass from paper-based subwoofers. Now my question is does cone material influence in terms of getting smooth bass?
Kevlar - there is no difference in the deformation diagram (action and reaction), but .... the stiffness of the metal and the ceramics, but... the agility of the plastic, but... the universality of carbon fibers, but ... nano technology, but ... at the end, the good old paper is still... perhaps... the best. Maybe attention to flax (linen) fibers... the same vegetable origin as cellulose... Long lived vegetarians... pardon Paul, naturists!
I hate FOAM surrounds as it lasts less than a year !!
plus gold plated conducts flow better than bare metal.
Gold is used to reduce oxidisation of the contact. Gold is fantastic for transfering heat, it is not the best for conducting electricity, For that you need to look at copper unfortunatley copper just loves to oxidise.
What about pure silver?
Carbon fiber might be interesting. Stiff and light.
It is becoming more common but I saw a chart recently and it showed that fibreglass for instance in many cases outperformed it.
Carbon fiber is light, but not the epoxy/fiberglass resin/hardener needed to stiffen it.
@Dave Micolichek Ya, when it comes to speakers we are really still futzing with Epoxy resin as a binder regardless of the other components. BTW there is "fiberglass" and "Glass Fiber". To this day I am trying to figure how they are actually not the same material other than how they are set up. By that I mean fiberglass is actually just the resin and the glass fibers mixed together usually where in terms of what Infinity refers to as "Glass Fiber" it is a woven mat which contains some amount of binder somewhere but in the case of my sub in my car the resin is not visible to the naked eye.
Rohacell....
How about carbon fiber? Strong and light!
AND glass fiber!
I guess someone has already tried it. There is a third factor Paul didn't mention. Some materials tend to swing (a little like a bell) May be that is a problem. If it is a suitable material we will see a lot of drivers with that material in the near future.
as for woofers..paper always sounds best, it gives a more "human" sound, sweeter, aluminum can be close if well designed, but not quite up to par with paper..plastic sounds the least pleasing ,and tends to soften around the point where the column is glued to the cone causing wave form distotion
1:07
i heard PS audio is going out of business
There is a (theoretically but practically not so much) sad truth about all drivers aspiring to act like true pistons: NONE OF THEM IS A PERFECT PISTON! Some may truly claim so for a (usually narrow) part of the frequency spectrum but, in general, all dynamic drivers are A COMBINATION of a PISTONIC DRIVER and a BENDING WAVE DRIVER. Some of them evolved towards the other side of the functional spectrum and proudly became (or claim so) pure bending wave drivers. These last ones are the incarnation of the hope that, yes, we can make great sounding dynamic drivers, even though they may not be perfect pistons! The next wonderful thing that comes after this realization, is that we can finally return to the good, old, for-millions-of-years-of-evolution-beloved-by-our-ears WOOD (or paper, or cellulose, it's the same thing). In my opinion, PAPER (or wood) has so many advantages as a cone material that it's a sin for a loudspeaker developer to ignore. It's no coincidense that the only truly wide range (and decently to greatly sounding) dynamic drivers have (guess what)... paper cones! (Well, perhaps domes is a little different story but domes never intended to be really wide-rangers). Cones and domes made of diverse materials are a by-product of the odyssey of loudspeaker designers who decided to take the path of dividing the reproduction of the audible spectrum to various different drivers. Various cone materials were recruited in compensation for the disadvantages this initial decision imparted to their products. Some (few) of them were very successful, nevertheless.
" It's no coincidense that the only truly wide range (and decently to greatly sounding) dynamic drivers have (guess what)... paper cones!" Of course, this is why the top 5 rated speakers in the world today all use "paper cones"? WRONG!!!
Out of curiosity would you be referring to the manger msw driver as one of them.
Not exactly. Mostly I had in mind the german physics and ohm drivers.
Exposure. This is the first I have ever heard of them. I see there are zero distributors in North America. I see as a manufacturer they have focused on home audio only and in keeping with standard North American home audio theory that "there could not possibly be anything better than what we already have" (like paper cones) Manger would have a very hard time gaining any traction here. Now, that said not everyone here is so arrogant to think that we own the rights to all of the knowledge. Focal has been gaining a lot of traction but I think it is because the old guard just can't bamboozle us their lies and half-truths any longer. Of course Focal is French which for some stupid reason I don't understand makes them more acceptable than if they were from many other countries. My instinct says it is a racism thing and as a Canadian, is yet another source of great embarrassment and shame. The good news as we uncover all of these wells of woeful acts we do sort through them. In my country, we mean that we do not wish to judge people like that. We will leave that for the judge and jury to figure out.
In looking at their stuff it appears that they often use a conventional cone in conjunction with their driver. Is that an indicator that they are not so good in the lower register. I also see that they are not particularly powerful so high SPL applications would not be an application where we could use them at this point. What is the word on what they sound like? Are they super clinical? I find that people often dislike hyper-accuracy and often desire something that generates a more smeared image. I think that is just because that is what they are used to. It is kinda like analogue video vs 4K. There is no question that 4K is so much better of a picture but the odd guy still rants about their old blurred out analogue Betacam crap.
Ah nice,germans do well on advancing loudspeaker design,ironic drivers seem to be one of the slowest in advancement unlike the CPU .
Are they crappy car woofers on the thumbnail or do they just look like crappy car woofers? lol
Visonik speaker separates creates above par car audio. They are no joke.
Didn't even specify which material is better for cone or dust caps... he jus goes off on a tangent 😑
kevlar for subs w00t w00t
you never come across ruind paper cones at all ? paper stronger than plastic ?
I will leave you to it .
Even Headphones are all made of plastic now not paper as they did but never mind
He just has to digress from the subject, there is no other way for him.
Does anyone know of carbon-fiber being used? DOE! Never mind - always google first. I found Sonus Faber EXTREMA speakers that are way overpriced @ $100,000 for a bookshelf speaker that may sound 2% better than my B&W CM1's - So much snake oil in this industry.
Funny i watched this video just 2 see what u would say about aluminum...and it was the dead last words out your mouth lol...In my car ive been running different aluminum subs since 2003...But in home I been using un and treated paper my whole life...I hate polys and Plastics they sound like beating on Rubbermaid trashcans!
If it isn't Magnesium Silicon Polypropylene or diamond deposit. I don't want it.
Hi Paul, you didnt really answer the question. I watched a different video by Audioholics which answered the question much better. Different materials DO make a difference in the sound of a speaker driver. Paper was good in many situations. Metal was usually the worst.
Over eight minutes to basically NOT answer the question. Why isn't this guy in Congress?
😂👍
Of course materials matter. A metal car is better than a cardboard one.