what are the thoughts of stand alone super tweeter

1 of the problems with super tweeters is they are designed to work with many loudspeakers so thus they never are fully matched or fully integrated to any unless you get lucky. Best to DIY or have one custom built to match your loudspeakers. You wouldn't just use any tweeter and crossover type if you needed to replace tweeters in your loudspeakers you would contact manufacturer or find best match to the speaker, but with super tweeters you just buy a one for all design? this not optimal at all. At least with subwoofers they have own amplifiers and fully adjustable networks but with commercial super tweeters your lucky to get a switch to adjust 2 setting or a cheap pentameter to match levels.Most don't even offer this. And if ST is properly designed for your loudspeaker you shouldn't need anything to adjust, level or crossover.Just move ST forward and back to set up time alignment.

Johnk, what you say is true only for those supertweeters that extend down into the music range. I have had many of those over time and never found satisfaction even when I used a crossover. The Muratas and Townshends have been no problem.

Aball, do try a pair of supertweeters sometime but be sure that they do not come into the music range. Or at least make certain that one pair you try don't.

Aball wrote: "I also find it funny that Kal is looking for "independent corroboration" when it is right here in this thread and in audio magazines. This is as much corroboration as we'll ever get."

That's pretty sad. The referred to papers at least attempt a controlled study and I am asking for a similarly scholarly corroboration. Almost everything posted here is anecdotal.

Kal

Kal, all audio is anecdotal. Again this is not a science, it is a taste choice.

Tgb said: "what you say is true only for those supertweeters that extend down into the music range."

Earlier you've stated that a supertweeter shouldn't have any output below 15 KHz. Let's grant that for a moment just for the sake of argument: it is stipulated that we have a tweeter that cuts off very sharply right at 15 KHz.

If one can step back and think about the implications for a transition from the speaker's tweeter to the supertweeter, what you get is a completely unpredictable response.

Take a speaker with strong response from 15 KHz to 20 or above. Adding a supertweeter in this situation would give you a response that would have a significant peak in this range.

Take a speaker with more limited output in the highs (say a single full range driver design that falls rapidly above 10 KHz) and now you have a major dip in response before the supertweeter kicks in.

High frequency curves vary widely among the thousands of speakers on the market, so the above are hardly the only two examples.

So the argument essentially becomes, no matter what the characteristics of the main speaker, more is always better when it comes to high frequencies.

I find that a suspect proposition. In virtually every other aspect of audio reproduction, effort put into having well-integrated, carefully crafted matches between individual components yields better results than simply throwing a mishmash of parts together, even if each part is excellent in its own fashion.

I guess the red flag just goes up for me anytime I encounter a situation that says one product or solution is always the answer no matter what the circumstances.