Hard Audio - Ceramic Speakers

Yikes, at $7,100/pair for the Seas or $3,700/pair for the Accutons, those had better be something amazing.  Given that most of us can't hear much beyond 14khz or so once we're nearing 40, I think I'll take a pass on those.

FWIW I did think the Accuton ceramic midrange sounded excellent on the Salk Song3As.  Salk is using another fancy midrange in the Song3 Encores, a magnesium cone with a bunch of holes drilled into it and some sort of (polymer I believe) backing made by Eton, which didn't sound bad, but the room those were in at Axpona wasn't set up as well as the room with the Song3As, so probably not a fair comparison.  

Hi Erik,

I´ve heared a couple of speakers using Accuton ceramic and diamond
chassis.

It seems to me, that especially the cross-overs are essential for a
natural sound.

A few companies are really producing bad, harsh and unnaturally
sounding speakers (to my ears) using (Accuton) ceramic chassis.
Marten, Gauder and Raidho were not bad. The only company which
produces speakers which are able to "sing musically" (to my ears)
is Tidal Audio.

@exfoliate   

Diamond tweeters like the one in B&W measure equally well compared to the Excel Millenium soft dome. So world class. Extremely delicate.

Don’t know much about the diamond midrange. Diamond is usually half a human hair in thickness. It might be very fragile if overdriven. Diamond is in a different league from ceramic. It is so rigid that any internal resonance may be entirely outside the audible band.

@shadorne

Regarding your views on hard drivers & ringing, what do you think of the Floyd Toole school of thought on this? On AVS he routinely cites his research (which is from the 80s), claiming no one can hear ringing and FR represents the full picture.

If you take Toole’s beliefs to their logical conclusion, the company he is with (Revel) is wasting their time as their entry level Concerta line has just as good FR measurements as Performa or Ultima, and things like using Ceramic drivers like on the Performa3 have no performance gain to using a driver that rings like aluminum or titanium, and by offering these things at a higher price they are merely selling to the market.

I asked Floyd why a company like Sennheiser would create something like Helmholtz Radiator to suppress time domain ringing when they could have simply changed the FR response of the driver, and he gave the impression that it’s done merely for marketing and FR response is all that matters.

IMO Toole’s beliefs on this seem weird considering we’ve known for decades people can pass double blind tests when comparing amps that used and didn’t use excessive negative feedback (and caused a spike in IMD distortion) even with ruler flat FR.

@exfoliate

Dr. Toole has a wealth of knowledge and far more experience than most experts. I trust what he says to be true. I think frequency response is primary but I can’t believe he would say that this is all that matters. After frequency response and harmonic distortion measurements then even dispersion response and finally waterfall is very important. Stereophile show off -axis dispersion and waterfall plots on most speaker tests.

Furthermore, we know that concert hall reverberation and room RT60 are very important to our enjoyment of music. Sabin studied this extensively. Anyone who says spurious artifacts and poorly damped resonances (easily visible in a waterfall plot) aren’t important is ignoring a very important aspect of SOTA design.

One interesting fact about any unusual bumps in the frequency response is that they are often an indication of some undesirable resonance that will be even more evident in a waterfall plot and visible in the impedance curve too. So flat frequency response is indeed the most important indicator of a good speaker - even transducers should have a flat smooth response across their useful bandwidth and any unusual wiggles usually indicate trouble.