@exfoliate
The big advantage of harder materials is they don’t suffer from cone breakup and therefore have a broader operating frequency response. This translates to tweeters that go up an extra third of an octave or so.
Ideal mid range is about 3 inch in size in order to avoid beaming at the upper end of the frequency range. Pulp/paper woven fabric and doped fabric work well. Rigid Sandwich with constrained layer damping are good. Polypropylene and magnesium are some of the stiffer materials that are damped internally. There is no “best” as it depends on overall design and application. The whole idea of internally damped is finding a balance between pistonic behavior over a useful bandwidth up to breakup and no timbral coloration of the cone at useful SPL levels.
Many agree that ATC 3 inch dome is close to an ideal mid range. It was developed more than 30 years ago. It plays very loud with a quality and clarity similar to Quad electrostatic speakers in the mids. Certainly if you care only about mid range at modest volumes then electrostatics are a great choice. In the case of electrostatics the entire super light diaphragm is amplifier controlled (no voice coil) so damping of the cone can be achieved electronically. Large SoundLabs are the bee knees in electrostatics.
The big advantage of harder materials is they don’t suffer from cone breakup and therefore have a broader operating frequency response. This translates to tweeters that go up an extra third of an octave or so.
Ideal mid range is about 3 inch in size in order to avoid beaming at the upper end of the frequency range. Pulp/paper woven fabric and doped fabric work well. Rigid Sandwich with constrained layer damping are good. Polypropylene and magnesium are some of the stiffer materials that are damped internally. There is no “best” as it depends on overall design and application. The whole idea of internally damped is finding a balance between pistonic behavior over a useful bandwidth up to breakup and no timbral coloration of the cone at useful SPL levels.
Many agree that ATC 3 inch dome is close to an ideal mid range. It was developed more than 30 years ago. It plays very loud with a quality and clarity similar to Quad electrostatic speakers in the mids. Certainly if you care only about mid range at modest volumes then electrostatics are a great choice. In the case of electrostatics the entire super light diaphragm is amplifier controlled (no voice coil) so damping of the cone can be achieved electronically. Large SoundLabs are the bee knees in electrostatics.