On this episode of Ask The Expert, Otto explains why our tweeters feature visible litz wires to the side of the dome, and discusses the benefits or soft-dome tweeters in general, and why Dynaudio has stuck by them for almost 50 years.
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In the our last episode of Ask The Expert, we addressed the question of why there are holes in our speaker drivers. Today, Otto explains why our tweeters feature visible wires.
If you look at any Dynaudio tweeter – hi-fi or studio – you will see that there are two visible litz wires that lead the incoming signal from the terminals to the voice coil. So, why exactly are these visible on our tweeters? The answer is actually relatively simple. Allow us to explain.
On a tweeter dome, there is a surround, which allows the dome to move forwards and backwards. On the majority of tweeters, this surround points upwards, but on a Dynaudio tweeter dome the surround points downwards. And the reason for this is that the dispersion from the tweeter is improved by having a surround that is not obstructing the sound coming from the tweeter.
The problem with such a surround design is that once we glue on the voice coil to the surround, the surround gets in the way of the litz wire. we could get around this problem by using a longer voice coil, but we choose to keep the voice coil short – thereby maintaining a stiffer connection, and keeping the weight down – allowing better performance. The drawback of this decision is that we are forced to move the litz wires to the outside of the tweeter, but by doing this we ultimately get better performance out of the tweeter.
We've been making speakers with soft dome tweeters right from our beginnings, back in 1977, and this is still what we do today, almost 50 years later. The question is: "why soft dome? Well, the answer is quite simple – we have not really seen or heard a compelling argument to change this practice.
We make tweeters that are considered to be reference tweeters in the market and put them in speakers that are used in world-class studios around the world. A lot of music is made with soft dome tweeters – even if you go into a studio not using Dynaudio speakers, you are very likely to see a lot of soft dome tweeters inside that studio from another manufacturer's speakers.
The next question is perhaps then: "why?"
If you take a holistic approach to the performance of the tweeter, you're not only taking the performance of the tweeter into consideration – you're taking into consideration the performance of the speaker as a whole.
And making the best possible sounding speaker doesn't necessarily require a tweeter that measures perfectly in the high frequencies, but is poor in the lower regions, for example. We have to make sure that the tweeter aligns well with the woofers. And the way in which we design drivers concentrates on creating a very tight collaboration between the tweeter and the mid-range drivers or the mid-woofers – the way the two interact is just as important as how the tweeter sounds at 8 kilohertz, for example.
Overall, we believe the best speaker designs are those with the soft-dome tweeters, simply because of the way they perform in terms of listening and not just how the perform when being measured – especially when you consider the speaker as a whole, and not just the individual driver.
It's important to mention at this point that we do continuously develop new in-house prototypes with different types of materials, and completely different kinds of drivers in order to test and develop what the next step for our speakers could be. We are not married to soft dome tweeters. We simply use them because we think that currently offer the best solution. If we get find better solutions along the way, we are very willing to change the way we design our drivers, as we have done with our woofers over the years.
It's a work in progress, and we have a lot of engineers who have experience using other types of drivers and other technologies but, for now, we believe that soft-dome tweeters offer the overall best solution for our speakers.