Tweeter Horn Magic - What does a Phase Cap do? 

Talk through a large cone shape, and it will amplify the output of your voice. But does your voice sound the same on the other end? Does it sound better... or worse? Or is it merely just "Louder" ? The horn colors the sound, and distorts the natural image of the sounds that its trying to represent. There is a good reason why those old record players with the large metal horns, didnt stay a standard... and its beyond the issues with the record-media itself.

@@johndough8115 Your mouth itself is a horn, actually. The sound is produced by your vocal cords down in your throat. Your ears are horns as well.

@@IBuildIt Our Voices, are meant to sound the way there are, as they are. Adding an additional Horn AFTER our mouths.. causes Distortion to the INTENDED sound of your NORMAL voices. Similarly, adding a huge cone on our ears, would also distort the intended sounds, as they were meant to be heard. Your argument, is childishly bad. Like something a 7yr old would say.

@@johndough8115 Horns generally don't distort. They boost a range of frequencies, much like I show in this video. And that boosted range of frequencies actually have less distortion (at the same volume)than the original sound. They certainly have their uses, as shown in this video.

@@IBuildIt Yes, they Do distort. You dont get something, for Nothing. As Ive said, Put a huge cone in front of your mouth, and record or have someone see if they can tell the difference. They will. The sound changes. The amount of change, is much smaller, on a much small scale. Its far more notable, when you scale that horn up in size. Yet that scaling shows that there is in fact, changes. ONE of those changes, has to do with timing and 3d image positioning. When you alter these things... you alter the intended effect and positioning, of the instruments / soundfield. While the frequencies might be similar... the sounds "IMAGE" is NOT the same as the recorded sounds image. The only way to know this... is to hear it with your own ears. Such as a direct A to B comparison, of two identical pairs of speakers, side by side. AND... these speakers have to be of a high enough caliber, to actually be able to project an accurate 3D Image in the first place. (Though, at high enough volume levels, the image still might come through enough to be detected) You yourself, have stated that Room treatment drastically changes the way things sound. Why? Because the sounds bounce around the room, and change... depending on the types of surfaces hit, the angles they hit at.. and how they interact with the other soundwaves in the room. Its the same type of thing, on a smaller scale. The original soundwaves are being Altered by the shape of the horn. A specific shape, could cause... for example.. the soundwaves to "Invert" from the original projected image. (Think of the game QIX, where the lines bounce and change directions) Again... its just like the previous example, of holding a large cone in front of your mouth. If you realize that can change the way your voice sounds, and is positioned in 3d space... then you SHOULD be able to recognize this LOGIC, on a smaller scale. Some time ago, I thought about making a tweeter that fires upwards, at a stone that was carved in an arc shape... to spread the sound in 360 degrees. I later realized, that the act of bouncing the sounds off of the curved arc itself... would distort the intended image. (Also, I later heard a 360 degree di-pole ribbon tweeter. And the 3d image was massively distorted, because the sounds that were intended to come from the front face of the speaker... were also coming from the rear.. bouncing off the walls, and returning slightly later... almost making an echo like effect... that ruined the music / image. At most, for a novelty effect.. you would want a 180 degree throw. Never a 360 degree throw... unless maybe your entire room was lined with sound absorbent material)

If they made the driver correctly in the first place, they would not have needed to modify anything. They chose to use the cheapest available tweeters, and mod them to get "Acceptable" sound.. to make as much profit as possible. This is an awful practice, that should Not be Praised (especially when the cost between a good tweeter, and a Sh*T tweeter, is likely less than 3$).

@@johndough8115 I disagree. Everyone is free to choose whatever tweeter suits their needs and price point. These microdomes typically outperform piezos and paper cone tweeters and fit in a lot of places a regular tweeter does not. Would I use one in a speaker build? Probably not, but a good hi-fi tweeter always costs a lot more money.

@@bryede You clearly do not understand what Im saying. Im saying, that the company that made these... was likely a Chinese MFG, that made mistakes (or simply, just made sub-par garbage). If they had designed and properly made these things correctly from the start... they would not have needed these extra plastic parts. Rather than use a decently made tweeter... Some company likely purchased them in bulk for dirt cheap, and engineered a way to slightly Improve their poor performance. The consumer is then essentially getting ripped off... being sold sub-par drivers, in an Over-Priced speaker set. As I guarantee that the savings of these Modded Tweeters, are Not being passed on to the consumer. (possible exceptions, are some savings when purchasing an entire boom-box) The best tweeters Ive every heard, come from the EPI 100v speakers (The updated tweeter version, that has the plastic bezels). There is a guy that used to work for the company, that Hand Makes brand new versions of them... for $60. (humanspeakers) If these were made in China on a mass scale, they would probably cost like $3 each to make, and probably would sell for $8, to the speaker Mfgs, in bulk. Yes, they are much larger in size, due to a massive powerful magnet. But they are meant to go into bookshelf or full sized cabinets. Not in tiny boom-box or PC Speakers.

This stuff has been around forever. It shouldn't be too hard to make decent tweeters by now

I had a Braun speaker system from the 70s. I was not impressed. The mid domes were actually touching the metal grill. And it's not only a problem mine had, you find countless of pictures online of pulled drivers with the pattern of the grill imprinted on them. What kind of "engineering" is that? The woofer edges fell apart and the cabinets ended up as firewood. I had to throw away one of the mids too, when I measured it it distorted horribly, because the grill squashed the dome out of alignment. Never understood the hype around that brand, there are much better vintage speakers out there.

@@westelaudio943 the part about certain drivers is true, some frames on certain ones did corrode and rust and the surround would come undone and had to be redone, but if you listen to the the 630 or 730, they were very good, maybe not by today's standards, but if you listen to those there's no denying they got those right and they sound really nice all around.

@@JukeboxAlley The drivers weren't the problem, the woofer succumbed to foam rot which is not uncommon for many drivers and it's fixable. Mid and tweeter seemed of very reasonable quality. The real problem is they released a product to the public with a design flaw (grills touching dome) that not even an amateur speaker designer with half a brain would have made - and that tells me all I need to know about that company, and their so-called star designer Dieter Rams. With the grill removed the speakers sounded alright - at least the one where the grill didn't manage to damage the mid - but nothing to write home about. There were much better speakers back in the 70s, however I prefer 60s and 80s/90s speakers and also my own designs and I never looked back after getting rid of the Browns. I don't remember the model because I tossed them may years ago I'm sure they had better models but still it tells me what I need to know about the quality control and design competence of that manufacturer.

@@westelaudio943 maybe true about the old versions, all the later versions didn't have foam surrounds they used rubber in the later models.

Thanks :) If you are treating (absorbing) the first reflections, then the off-axis response has very little impact on the in room response. The idea is to stop those reflections so that they won't corrupt the sound coming directly from the speaker.

@@IBuildIt I have no treatment

It looks like he’s using REW

Indeed. Diffraction tends to smear the perceived clarity / accuracy in the mids / highs. In general humans are most perceptive of the accuracy or lack of in what human brains are natively tuned to. I.e, in decreasing order of detectability: (1) human voices speaking (2) natural sounds (3) acoustic instrument if you are a skilled player (say if you have played acoustic guitars for years then any departure from a live like sound will be perceivable). Pretty much anything else is difficult to judge, for lack of reference for our brains. In my personal experience (going to audio stores & shows) about 70% of the speakers in the $2K - 20K range fail (1) and/or (2) and/or (3). However, in about half of these cases I would have been hard pressed to detect these issues by just listening to 'music' (lot of caveats here, it all depends on the type of music. Some music can be very discriminating I mean music where a lot of stuff is going on which distracts the brain, or when it comes to synthesized sounds for which our brain generally has no reference / expectation to compare to.). He keeps comparing the importance of diffraction to 1st reflections on a wall, which is a completely different effect. Diffraction also sometimes shows up in 1/3 octave smoothed FR plots (depends on baffle / driver design), so his _'wiggles already exist so it does not matter'_ point is off.

What you both are mistaking for diffraction is almost certainly early reflection or imagination. If diffraction was such important factor, there would be a study proving the audibility of the effect. If you know of such a study, link to it here. Otherwise, you are no different from the guys that go on and on about how great the new pair of speaker cables they just bought sound.

​@@IBuildIt If there is a 3db hump in the frequency response, it is almost certainly audible whether that hump comes from a resonance, diffraction or the baffle step. Distinctly audible as a hump in the response to most people, probably not, but perceptually enough to alter the illusion of realism. Question, do you also dispute whether baffle step correction is audible? Would you say that baffle step correction is audible but diffraction isn't? After all, the baffle step is the result of diffraction to begin with?

No, baffle step is an audible effect - measurable and well established as something that has been proven to be audible. Proven to be, unlike diffraction. If, like I sad, it's that easy to discern diffraction, why is it that there have been nothing that has done that. I asked for the study and you came back with more "because..." proof. Notably, Siegfried Linkwitz didn't believe diffraction is audible. Are you saying you understand the subject better than he did?

@@IBuildIt I'm not trying disagree with Linkwitz. I think you see diffraction as something independent from the frequency response which isn't really true unless you deliberately EQ out the SPL differences so only the time domain effects are left. But the baffle step is an effect of diffraction and that is mainly where I have dealt with it. I think the focus on diffraction of the treble may be a bit misguided. But if you looked up studies on baffle step correction, you would certainly find studies on that, which likely discuss diffraction as you can't really discuss the baffle step without diffraction. And if I can get rid of a 3db hump at 3KHz by rounding over some edges on my speaker I think that is likely to be audible just from an SPL point of view, no differently than baffle step correction.

I mean I can hear the difference between a room that has no treatment for reflections and one that has. I think everyone can.

@@IBuildIt Indeed. That's one of the main differences btwn a headphone and a speaker klistening experience. The sense of space and 3D image w speakers mostly comes from the 1st wall reflections.

There is math, and it is used in horn design. You are kinda putting the cart before the horse in your thinking though. There is no "optimal" horn shape. Horn shape it dictated by the intended purpose, and the shape has a huge impact on what it sounds like and how it performs. As an example, if yo are designing a speaker to have uniform directivity (same amplitude over a wide angle) across all the drivers, you might consider using a conical horn on the lows (narrows the dispersion), and a parabolic horn on the tweeter (widens the dispersion). Klipshorns do exactly this. There are trade offs, parabolic horns add distortion in the lower part of their bandwidth, and conical horns have diffraction and combing issues near the top of their bandwidth. The math is straightforward to people who can do math, and scary to those who can't. Numerical solutions are very easy to generate with a bit of coding skills.

We can consult the guy that first used the name "waveguide" to describe a horn, Earl Geddes: "...all waveguides are horns..." Whether it gets the efficiency boost from directivity or from impedance matching, it's still a horn.

Technically, every sound can be measured. What can't be measured is how our brains process and interpret the sound that is picked up by our ears. A huge number of things affect how we hear and what we think we hear.

@@IBuildIt technically yes but its not always that easy to hear a dip in the response, dont think its just your ears. i just finished up a set of small bookshelf speakers with a 3. order passive x-over they measured just right but still the tweeters sounded a bit sharp on some recordings. i then replaced the aircore inductor going parallel in the tweeter x-over with another one (same value) that had less resistance, the difference was under 0.5 db drop in amplitude in the region where the coil was working and the change was huge, they became very pleasant with absolutely no sharpness to it without changing the overall tone. i dont think many would look at the measurements of the two configurations and think there would be a very big difference in soundquality. and thats my point, some things are difficult to hear other things are easy.

Please show the scientific study that proves the audibility of diffraction. I haven't found one. And my workshop is set up for recording video, so it has a lot more treatment than the average audiophile's listening room.

One of those 100 things might be the shape of your outer ear. You could have plastic surgery done to make it the optimal shape for detecting the other 99 inaudible issues to tweak.

@@IBuildIt 😂😂 No that is 101st thing that comes later when you exhaust all other hahah

Might want to watch a bit more closely. The default starting point is 500, then I changed it to 5.