Hebden Bridge is just a few miles from where I live, I have 2x sony vintage super tweeters but not much knowledge how to install them in a 3 way X-overs
After 23 years, in 2023 I bought thin-film AMT ribbon tweeter speaker GoldenEar BRX and I love them so much that I bought a 3rd one as the center speaker for the home teater. source=Apple Music lossless
It's purely academic seeing as at our age and any age above about 12 our hearing starts to decline from the 20-20 hearing to ...well at our age 20-14 or less. But I still like the chat
Most people *never* hear that full range. Most people hear very little below 40hz or above 15khz. For someone to hear the entire spectrum is actually quite rare, even in childhood. The 20 to 20k is a bandwidth allocation in the EM spectrum. These allocations often include guard bands to prevent interference between services. The remainder is just that... extra bandwidth to limit interference.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 yes that makes sense. I know that I can't hear below 28Hz.. and above 14kHz so talking of supertweeters is purely academic. My technics speakers have supertweeters barely an 0.75 inch diameter from memory. All I can think is the higher harmonics reinforce the mid highs.
@@armarra What most people call "upper midrange" or "mid high' is actually the range from about 800 to 2,000hz. By the time your 16khz supertweeter does anything you're already looking at the 20th harmonic of 800 or the 8th harmonic of 2,000 ... how much impact do you expect that to have?
@@Douglas_Blake_579 yes true..but I was talking about the 4000-16000 range. Let's just call it high range not super high. I understand that the higher harmonics have progressively less and less effect on fundamentals.. My graphic extends from 16hz to 32kHz. This only makes any sense if you assume the 16hz strengthens the 32hz and the 32kHz strengths the 16kHz and possibly a bit lower.
@@armarra in the 4 to 16khz range you will have mostly harmonic content. There are no musical notes above 4200hz. C8, the highest key on a piano is at 4180hz. My software marks 4k to 6k as "Presence" and 6k to 20K as "Brilliance" I think the bottom line here is that by the time you get past the piano keyboard there is no more musical content. Everything is harmonics (timbre) and by the time you get past 16khz it's pretty much silent. So it's unlikely your recordings contain much real information for the super-tweeter to reproduce, and it's unlikely you'd hear it, even if they did.
I always thought super tweeters were used in older speakers that had paper cone tweeters, as they struggled up so high. So it doesn't really effect dome, ribbon, amt, etc type tweeters.. Though like many things in high end audio. Could be just a myth..
Everyone talks about "audio bandwidth" as though there is actual music at 20khz. In fact, virtually all musical content occurs below 4200hz. The top key on the piano keyboard .. C8.. is at 4180hz. Middle C .. C4.. is at a mere 261hz Ride symbols usually crash at about 600hz. Hi-hats are typically at about 2,000 hz. Even that delicate tinkling triangle is unlikely to be any higher than 3khz. So where are all those harmonics, we keep sweating over? If we take the tuning frequency ..A4.. which is 440.hz we have harmonics every 440hz ... the 10th harmonic of A4 is at 4,400hz ... yes the 10th harmonic. Once you get past the 4,200hz musical boundary, all content is harmonic in nature. By the time you get an octave above that (8,400hz), all you will hear is pss pss and ting ting... and an octave above that (16,800hz) is virtually silent. That expensive super-tweeter will just sit there doing nothing... But you won't know that, because you can't hear it. Most people don't hear anything over about 15khz. Then there's the matter of wavelength ... at 20khz a sine wave, in air, is only 1.7 cm (5/8th inch) and even the tiniest misalignment will result in cancellation, not augmentation. That is, misplacing the super tweeter device by even 8mm (1/4 inch) could have a destructive effect on the highs you already enjoy. I will agree with Paul that going beyond 20khz with the electronics makes sense in terms of time alignment and not skewing the phase of actual musical content at lower frequencies ... but to do that with speakers is just a complete waste of effort and money.
All a super tweeter does is “blast” the tweet across the room aka louder than a regular tweeter. You still can’t hear like a dog..😀 You paid me $1200. for a tweet I will tell you the Aliens from Zork can hear it..👍🤗I’ll take that in cash only.😀 I got to run with the money.
Low distortion with the existing tweeter has to precede the importance of connecting up a super-tweeter. Get that first and only then think about adding super-tweeter. Me, I don't need it much.
As someone else's comment mentioned in the comments, if you're not an audio expert (a real one,t not a phony one), you should refrain from making absolutistic statements about things you have no experience with. It's sort of like the audio cable thing; like the fact that most cable doubters, with their theories about cables have never actually owned real expensive audio cables to know what they're talking about.Most commenting on super tweeters have never actually owned and lived with a good super tweeter. As far as this subject is concerned, rather than playing a single test tone over 20k, it would be better to play two test tones together,; one at 10k or 15K and one maybe at 25K, and see if people can tell the individual tone, from the one that has the combined tones. Our hearing can sense vibrations. On the other end of the audible spectrum, we are supposed to be able to hear only as low as 20hertz. Yet if there is lightning and thunder, we can sometimes hear rattling sounds from the thunder as the the noise of the thunder goes below 20 hertz. Same with super tweeters and their frequency range. I have had two different brands of speakers with built in super tweeters. When you disconnect the super tweeter,s you can always and easily tell a difference. They usually cross over from the regular tweeter at 12 or 14K. I hear crisper and quickerr transient response. My one one super tweeters diaphram weighs less than the air in a whisky shot glass, says the manufacturer. While I don't think that a super tweeter is absolutely mandatory; you can tell the difference even though only the highest overtones of musical frequencies can reside that high up in frequency. When they list highest frequencies of musical instruments, they don't generally list what their highest overtones can be.This is a perfect example of how bad and wrong information can be dispersed in a comments section by theorists (flawed ones) and the accompanying follow the leader mentality. If you've never lived with a superb super tweeter, you just don't know. Once again, it's like people discussing what Spain is like, who' have neve actually been to Spain; or even been to the European continent at all.
If you can only hear up to 20 kHz, what benefit will a super tweeter that goes beyond your hearing have? It’s like saying my TV can display infrared and ultraviolet light.
Actually ... most TVs do produce both IR and UV light ... but your point is correct. The truth is that most people hear very little under about 40hz and virtually nothing over 15khz. The rest of that 20-20k spec is there just to keep a "guard band" around the most used frequencies. In fact, if you look back in history to the late 1940s and early 1950s, you will discover the original "High Fidelity" proposals only went from 50hz to 10khz.
The articulation and tambre of audio ....not to mention, the psyhcoacoustics of ambience through phase-alignment, is greatly improved by signal that is beyond our range of hearing.
@@duanewalker1011 I might buy "slightly" but not "greatly". We aren't talking about 2nd, 3rd or 4th harmonics here, we are talking about 20th and 30th harmonics, which occur a levels that, even if we could hear those frequencies, would be so low as to be inaudible. Take the simple example of Piano note A4, which is 440hz. To affect that in any meaningful way via ultrasonics you would be playing with the 50th harmonic at 22,000 hz... and with normal decay of 3db per octave, so it would be at -150db compared to the fundamental. The effect would be so trivial as to challenge even the very best test equipment... given of course that it is even recordable in the first place. Toss in the vagaries of crossovers, positioning and acoustics and I'd bet ultrasonic frequencies will cause more problems than they solve.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 You may be right, especially when dealing with "normal" decay. But I have experienced (or seem to) an effect of "realism" related to ultrasonics (especially subsonics) when played at volumes that create SPLs that are felt rather than heard. Then again ....I may be wrong.
@@duanewalker1011 When you get to the "felt rather than heard" threshold your hearing is already way into sensory overload. All the reading I've done on this pretty much agrees that we are best able to discern details and understand spoken language at about 70 to 80 decibels. That is just a bit louder than normal conversation which averages about 65dba. These effects you are noting could just as easily be sensory overload and not real effects at all. I just wish I had a dollar for every "audiophile" who's demonstrated a problem with his system by turning it up near-full volume, driving his amplifiers in to clipping and my ears into retreat. On more than one occasion it's taken a couple of days for my hearing to recover from that.
I use premium class A/B amplification. My speakers are described as ‘high end’ whatever that means, by all reviews. The manufacturer’s website described them as mid-range flagships. I do have a £1200 pair of ‘super tweeters’. They do make a notable improvement. The question is, had I spent £1200 more on my floorstanders, instead of my existing floorstanders plus super tweeters, would I have ended up with a better all round package?
That would depend entirely on what you've got now and what you intend to buy. Price is a terrible indicator of quality, especially in audio products. But one thing I can tell you is that you could have saved £1200 every easily.
@@howardskeivys4184 I was a service tech for a lot of years ... I've heard super-tweeters in systems before, even installed them. The benefit is trivial, at best. Most don't start until about 16khz, which is already above the range of the average person's hearing.
In my experience, price is an absolutely WONDERFUL indicator of quality in audio. But it's not quality because of the price sticker they slap on it I must have bought nearing 100 different audio pieces in my life since my youth, and very rarely has anything cheap sounded as good or better than something significantly more expensive. I have never bought anything expensive that wasn't really good, except one time. It was a Japanese speaker that my then inexperienced ears, took a while to realize it had a somewhat nasal coloration. Except for that, it did everything else first rate. Even so, I don't think I'd ever assume or trust that anything audio is really good because of what it costs. But 90 out of 91 isn't bad.
@@sidesup8286 Okay then ... how do you explain that under comprehensive testing, two under $100 amplifiers ... A07 and V3 ... both beat out 80+ high end amplifiers, some costing thousands of dollars, in ASR's ranking? th-cam.com/video/byj_BDf5xwM/w-d-xo.html
my AVA amps and pre amps go out to 500kZ, and min distortion...well under .01% at all freqs...and they don't cost the price of a Porsche, cus there is no reason for most over priced jewelery. Drives my Legacy Whisper so fine
500kZ... are you sure you're not reading the impedance instead of the frequency response? 500khz is just below the AM Broadcast band and is widely used by Radio Amateurs and marine communications ... on the 630 and 2200 meter LF bands. Such equipment wold be very likely to pick up and reproduce those frequencies by a process called "Audio Rectification"... producing significant interference with the audio reproduction. Also with that kind of bandwidth phase shift due to slew rates and propagation delays would almost certainly produce a device that is prone to high frequency self-oscillation which can, and does, kill tweeters. I might believe 50khz ... but not 500. There's no reason to do that and the problems it would cause far outweigh any advantage you might gain by it. From the AVA website: "Bandwidth is flat from 3Hz to 70KHz."
@@Douglas_Blake_579 AVA also has incredible slew rates, look into his stuff....priced for mortals, built to last and work and perform...been using his stuff for decades...also great reliable, sonic bliss, and priced on planet earth
I haven't had the pleasure of listening to any speaker system with a super tweeter. If they actually do make the kind of difference that Paul is speaking about then that falls into the category of high-end audio and should be available in the marketplace. Unless anyone who is commenting is an audio design engineer, I think they should refrain from making remarks about dogs and bats without knowing the real psycho-acoustic facts.
Exactly. And there are plenty of scientific studies showing the effects of frequencies above 20kHz on humans. Still, many people are just too lazy to do any real research and would rather make cheap, childish, throw-away comments instead of looking into this fascinating subject.
Sooo.. why go beyond the 44.1khz of a CD? 🤔
CDs are brick wall filtered at 22khz ... half the sample rate. There is nothing recorded beyond that.
@@Douglas_Blake_579
Oh yeah.. I forgot about that Nylaquist thingamajigger.
To reproduce 20 kHz effectively we need to go double that.
Because of the digital reconstruction filters. They do less harm to the signal in Hi-Rez compared to 44.1khz.
Hebden Bridge is just a few miles from where I live, I have 2x sony vintage super tweeters but not much knowledge how to install them in a 3 way X-overs
After 23 years, in 2023 I bought thin-film AMT ribbon tweeter speaker GoldenEar BRX and I love them so much that I bought a 3rd one as the center speaker for the home teater.
source=Apple Music lossless
My tweeters go up to 40khz. My dog alerted to a passage on a Miles Davis CD. I heard nothing abnormal.
Super tweeters are very important! For your dog, your cat or your dolphin, if you have one.
Not to forget the bats ...
I got a pod of Beaked Whales but no cat dog or dolphins my whales love em. !!
Not easy to phase align tweeter and supertweeter.
Love my JVC Ribbon tweeters that go out to about 40kHz.
It's purely academic seeing as at our age and any age above about 12 our hearing starts to decline from the 20-20 hearing to ...well at our age 20-14 or less.
But I still like the chat
Most people *never* hear that full range. Most people hear very little below 40hz or above 15khz. For someone to hear the entire spectrum is actually quite rare, even in childhood.
The 20 to 20k is a bandwidth allocation in the EM spectrum. These allocations often include guard bands to prevent interference between services. The remainder is just that... extra bandwidth to limit interference.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 yes that makes sense. I know that I can't hear below 28Hz.. and above 14kHz so talking of supertweeters is purely academic. My technics speakers have supertweeters barely an 0.75 inch diameter from memory.
All I can think is the higher harmonics reinforce the mid highs.
@@armarra
What most people call "upper midrange" or "mid high' is actually the range from about 800 to 2,000hz. By the time your 16khz supertweeter does anything you're already looking at the 20th harmonic of 800 or the 8th harmonic of 2,000 ... how much impact do you expect that to have?
@@Douglas_Blake_579 yes true..but I was talking about the 4000-16000 range. Let's just call it high range not super high.
I understand that the higher harmonics have progressively less and less effect on fundamentals..
My graphic extends from 16hz to 32kHz. This only makes any sense if you assume the 16hz strengthens the 32hz and the 32kHz strengths the 16kHz and possibly a bit lower.
@@armarra
in the 4 to 16khz range you will have mostly harmonic content. There are no musical notes above 4200hz. C8, the highest key on a piano is at 4180hz.
My software marks 4k to 6k as "Presence" and 6k to 20K as "Brilliance"
I think the bottom line here is that by the time you get past the piano keyboard there is no more musical content. Everything is harmonics (timbre) and by the time you get past 16khz it's pretty much silent. So it's unlikely your recordings contain much real information for the super-tweeter to reproduce, and it's unlikely you'd hear it, even if they did.
I always thought super tweeters were used in older speakers that had paper cone tweeters, as they struggled up so high.
So it doesn't really effect dome, ribbon, amt, etc type tweeters.. Though like many things in high end audio. Could be just a myth..
... or a sales pitch.
Make no mistake, a whole lot of what we're asked to buy is unnecessary and some of it is even a step backwards.
Everyone talks about "audio bandwidth" as though there is actual music at 20khz.
In fact, virtually all musical content occurs below 4200hz. The top key on the piano keyboard .. C8.. is at 4180hz. Middle C .. C4.. is at a mere 261hz Ride symbols usually crash at about 600hz. Hi-hats are typically at about 2,000 hz. Even that delicate tinkling triangle is unlikely to be any higher than 3khz.
So where are all those harmonics, we keep sweating over?
If we take the tuning frequency ..A4.. which is 440.hz we have harmonics every 440hz ... the 10th harmonic of A4 is at 4,400hz ... yes the 10th harmonic. Once you get past the 4,200hz musical boundary, all content is harmonic in nature. By the time you get an octave above that (8,400hz), all you will hear is pss pss and ting ting... and an octave above that (16,800hz) is virtually silent.
That expensive super-tweeter will just sit there doing nothing... But you won't know that, because you can't hear it. Most people don't hear anything over about 15khz.
Then there's the matter of wavelength ... at 20khz a sine wave, in air, is only 1.7 cm (5/8th inch) and even the tiniest misalignment will result in cancellation, not augmentation. That is, misplacing the super tweeter device by even 8mm (1/4 inch) could have a destructive effect on the highs you already enjoy.
I will agree with Paul that going beyond 20khz with the electronics makes sense in terms of time alignment and not skewing the phase of actual musical content at lower frequencies ... but to do that with speakers is just a complete waste of effort and money.
All a super tweeter does is “blast” the tweet across the room aka louder than a regular tweeter. You still can’t hear like a dog..😀
You paid me $1200. for a tweet I will tell you the Aliens from Zork can hear it..👍🤗I’ll take that in cash only.😀
I got to run with the money.
Naim amps generally have a brick wall cut off after 20khz
That’s not correct
And so does every CD and DAC ever made.
Low distortion with the existing tweeter has to precede the importance of connecting up a super-tweeter. Get that first and only then think about adding super-tweeter. Me, I don't need it much.
As someone else's comment mentioned in the comments, if you're not an audio expert (a real one,t not a phony one), you should refrain from making absolutistic statements about things you have no experience with. It's sort of like the audio cable thing; like the fact that most cable doubters, with their theories about cables have never actually owned real expensive audio cables to know what they're talking about.Most commenting on super tweeters have never actually owned and lived with a good super tweeter. As far as this subject is concerned, rather than playing a single test tone over 20k, it would be better to play two test tones together,; one at 10k or 15K and one maybe at 25K, and see if people can tell the individual tone, from the one that has the combined tones. Our hearing can sense vibrations. On the other end of the audible spectrum, we are supposed to be able to hear only as low as 20hertz. Yet if there is lightning and thunder, we can sometimes hear rattling sounds from the thunder as the the noise of the thunder goes below 20 hertz. Same with super tweeters and their frequency range.
I have had two different brands of speakers with built in super tweeters. When you disconnect the super tweeter,s you can always and easily tell a difference. They usually cross over from the regular tweeter at 12 or 14K. I hear crisper and quickerr transient response. My one one super tweeters diaphram weighs less than the air in a whisky shot glass, says the manufacturer. While I don't think that a super tweeter is absolutely mandatory; you can tell the difference even though only the highest overtones of musical frequencies can reside that high up in frequency. When they list highest frequencies of musical instruments, they don't generally list what their highest overtones can be.This is a perfect example of how bad and wrong information can be dispersed in a comments section by theorists (flawed ones) and the accompanying follow the leader mentality. If you've never lived with a superb super tweeter, you just don't know. Once again, it's like people discussing what Spain is like, who' have neve actually been to Spain; or even been to the European continent at all.
Yes, and there are quite a few studies where people have noticed a difference in music reproduction when the higher frequencies (+22khz) are included.
@@nancyblubberhead7256interested, do you know how I can access any of these studies? Thanks!
Trading my pair of super tweeters for a pair of Hokas. Standing up to listen.
If you can only hear up to 20 kHz, what benefit will a super tweeter that goes beyond your hearing have? It’s like saying my TV can display infrared and ultraviolet light.
Actually ... most TVs do produce both IR and UV light ... but your point is correct.
The truth is that most people hear very little under about 40hz and virtually nothing over 15khz. The rest of that 20-20k spec is there just to keep a "guard band" around the most used frequencies.
In fact, if you look back in history to the late 1940s and early 1950s, you will discover the original "High Fidelity" proposals only went from 50hz to 10khz.
The articulation and tambre of audio ....not to mention, the psyhcoacoustics of ambience through phase-alignment, is greatly improved by signal that is beyond our range of hearing.
@@duanewalker1011
I might buy "slightly" but not "greatly". We aren't talking about 2nd, 3rd or 4th harmonics here, we are talking about 20th and 30th harmonics, which occur a levels that, even if we could hear those frequencies, would be so low as to be inaudible.
Take the simple example of Piano note A4, which is 440hz. To affect that in any meaningful way via ultrasonics you would be playing with the 50th harmonic at 22,000 hz... and with normal decay of 3db per octave, so it would be at -150db compared to the fundamental. The effect would be so trivial as to challenge even the very best test equipment... given of course that it is even recordable in the first place.
Toss in the vagaries of crossovers, positioning and acoustics and I'd bet ultrasonic frequencies will cause more problems than they solve.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 You may be right, especially when dealing with "normal" decay. But I have experienced (or seem to) an effect of "realism" related to ultrasonics (especially subsonics) when played at volumes that create SPLs that are felt rather than heard. Then again ....I may be wrong.
@@duanewalker1011
When you get to the "felt rather than heard" threshold your hearing is already way into sensory overload.
All the reading I've done on this pretty much agrees that we are best able to discern details and understand spoken language at about 70 to 80 decibels. That is just a bit louder than normal conversation which averages about 65dba.
These effects you are noting could just as easily be sensory overload and not real effects at all.
I just wish I had a dollar for every "audiophile" who's demonstrated a problem with his system by turning it up near-full volume, driving his amplifiers in to clipping and my ears into retreat. On more than one occasion it's taken a couple of days for my hearing to recover from that.
I use premium class A/B amplification. My speakers are described as ‘high end’ whatever that means, by all reviews. The manufacturer’s website described them as mid-range flagships. I do have a £1200 pair of ‘super tweeters’. They do make a notable improvement. The question is, had I spent £1200 more on my floorstanders, instead of my existing floorstanders plus super tweeters, would I have ended up with a better all round package?
That would depend entirely on what you've got now and what you intend to buy. Price is a terrible indicator of quality, especially in audio products.
But one thing I can tell you is that you could have saved £1200 every easily.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 how can you say that without having heard the before and after?
@@howardskeivys4184
I was a service tech for a lot of years ... I've heard super-tweeters in systems before, even installed them. The benefit is trivial, at best. Most don't start until about 16khz, which is already above the range of the average person's hearing.
In my experience, price is an absolutely WONDERFUL indicator of quality in audio. But it's not quality because of the price sticker they slap on it I must have bought nearing 100 different audio pieces in my life since my youth, and very rarely has anything cheap sounded as good or better than something significantly more expensive. I have never bought anything expensive that wasn't really good, except one time. It was a Japanese speaker that my then inexperienced ears, took a while to realize it had a somewhat nasal coloration. Except for that, it did everything else first rate. Even so, I don't think I'd ever assume or trust that anything audio is really good because of what it costs. But 90 out of 91 isn't bad.
@@sidesup8286
Okay then ... how do you explain that under comprehensive testing, two under $100 amplifiers ... A07 and V3 ... both beat out 80+ high end amplifiers, some costing thousands of dollars, in ASR's ranking?
th-cam.com/video/byj_BDf5xwM/w-d-xo.html
Super tweeter makes sense, if you are Batman or a Bat.
my AVA amps and pre amps go out to 500kZ, and min distortion...well under .01% at all freqs...and they don't cost the price of a Porsche, cus there is no reason for most over priced jewelery. Drives my Legacy Whisper so fine
500kZ... are you sure you're not reading the impedance instead of the frequency response?
500khz is just below the AM Broadcast band and is widely used by Radio Amateurs and marine communications ... on the 630 and 2200 meter LF bands. Such equipment wold be very likely to pick up and reproduce those frequencies by a process called "Audio Rectification"... producing significant interference with the audio reproduction.
Also with that kind of bandwidth phase shift due to slew rates and propagation delays would almost certainly produce a device that is prone to high frequency self-oscillation which can, and does, kill tweeters.
I might believe 50khz ... but not 500. There's no reason to do that and the problems it would cause far outweigh any advantage you might gain by it.
From the AVA website: "Bandwidth is flat from 3Hz to 70KHz."
Sweet speakers
@@Douglas_Blake_579 AVA also has incredible slew rates, look into his stuff....priced for mortals, built to last and work and perform...been using his stuff for decades...also great reliable, sonic bliss, and priced on planet earth
@@Douglas_Blake_579 th-cam.com/video/12T7JFLGlf0/w-d-xo.html
@@cengeb
Which has exactly what do do with anything?
Just what have I looking for this week.
I haven't had the pleasure of listening to any speaker system with a super tweeter. If they actually do make the kind of difference that Paul is speaking about then that falls into the category of high-end audio and should be available in the marketplace. Unless anyone who is commenting is an audio design engineer, I think they should refrain from making remarks about dogs and bats without knowing the real psycho-acoustic facts.
Exactly. And there are plenty of scientific studies showing the effects of frequencies above 20kHz on humans. Still, many people are just too lazy to do any real research and would rather make cheap, childish, throw-away comments instead of looking into this fascinating subject.
WWW: what works where. In a few environments there super tweeter are appropriate, however you are probably building that room.