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Adding supertweeter to full range speaker

mil46

pfm Member
Evening all,
Ive got a pair of Audience 1+1 sat in their box. I used them for about a month and they were great. Cant get to part with them as they had great bass for their size and mids were excellent. But lacked sparkle and air in comparison to my 2 way regular speakers.

Has anyone ever tried a supertweeter with a full range speaker? or is it not as easy as that?

Thanks for any responses.
 
Evening all,
Ive got a pair of Audience 1+1 sat in their box. I used them for about a month and they were great. Cant get to part with them as they had great bass for their size and mids were excellent. But lacked sparkle and air in comparison to my 2 way regular speakers.

Has anyone ever tried a supertweeter with a full range speaker? or is it not as easy as that?

Thanks for any responses.
It depends what frequencies you associate with 'sparkle and air' and/or what frequencies your Audience are subdued in. AIUI, correctly designed supertweeters should only extend the very highest frequencies of a loudspeaker, frequencies that are probably higher than what many would associate with 'sparkle', and will therefore have very little effect. You do, however, get supertweeters that are designed to be more 'audible' within the audible range, they achieve this by using a shallow high-pass filter slope so that they augment the frequencies that a normal tweeter would produce. Where the wavelengths of the tweeter and supertweeter are in phase, this will be effective in boosting high frequency output. However, where the wavelengths are out of phase, you could end up with less output at certain frequencies compared to having no supertweeter in the system, hence the comb-filtering that @awkwardbydesign alluded to. It's going to be a case of trial and error with positioning the supertweeter (generally the closer you can get it to the existing tweeter the better) and experimenting with the crossover slopes, but in the end you may find it a whole lot easier and more effective just to apply some EQ to your Audience to boost their top octave.
 
Thanks for the response. Probably a bit too technical for me . So in amateur terminology… I love the midrange of the Audience speakers and I can live with limited bass. However they are wanting slightly in comparison to the treble/highs (described as sparkle in my original post) of my regular 2 way stand mounts that I use. I suppose as you mention, if I had tone controls , I’d be wanting to turn up the treble, but alas I don’t have that luxury.
Thanks again for the response.
 
What age are you?
As in "could you hear a supertweeter anyway?" At least I am guessing that's the reason for the question.
And the combing effect will be affected by head position. A couple of inches higher or lower could* change it.
* A first order crossover would make it worse. I am about to change mine from first to second order for that reason.
 
Thanks Fatmarley for the excellent video. Im somewhat clearer now. Maybe Ill try the upward facing tweeter as the video suggests.

Im a mere 56 Mr Pig. In terms of what I can hear.... I may not be able to hear the full extent of what a supertweeter can do however I can certainly hear enough to be able to determine that there is a high frequency difference between my traditional 2 way speakers and the Audience 1+1
Thanks all
 
That sparkle you are missing is not super-tweeter territory. It's lower frequencies than that. Had the Townshend ST and they didn't bring me this sparkle.
 
That sparkle you are missing is not super-tweeter territory. It's lower frequencies than that. Had the Townshend ST and they didn't bring me this sparkle.
This is my inclination too. Adding supertweeters to my Tannoy Lancaster MG15 didn't bring the additional sparkle/clarity I craved. What did was using EQ to reduce its bloated lower midrange, this made the FR response more balanced and allowed me to hear more sparkle and clarity higher up.
 
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It would've been good if Danny had taken measurements of the speaker with the supertweeter in rear- and upward-firing configurations for comparison, but I suppose a quasi-anechoic on-axis measurement at 1 metre would be pretty meaningless here as it will presumably be very different to how well such a configuration will integrate at the listening seat?
 
Okay…. I’m going to borrow a couple of tweeters and I’ll experiment with what Danny is suggesting in the video (point them upwards) and play aboutvwith that for a while.
 
You can see from these measuremements of my Tannoy Lancasters in 2016 that integrating a supertweeter with the left speaker was more successful than integrating one with the right speaker. Had I moved the mic a centimetre to the left or right, however, the results could well have been different!

07%20tannoy%20lancaster%20left%20farfield%20with%20amp%20without%20supertweeter_zpsb5knu4lc.jpg~original


08%20tannoy%20lancaster%20right%20farfield%20with%20amp%20without%20supertweeter_zps22aqtucx.jpg~original
 
Try a cheap pair of Batpure wotsits. I did , with some WD20Ts which use the Seas Concentrics so not exactly full band and the results were astonishing compared with their use in my WD25Ts with the Millennium tweeter where the results obtained were pretty nondescript. According to Peter Comeau the use of supertweeters is often justified not because you can hear super frequencies but because they even up the power output of concentric tweeters in normal mid-high frequencies. No idea re. Audience.
 
I'm a mere 56 Mr Pig.

Not far behind you. You'll probably not be hearing very much above 10 to 12kHz. Upshot being that you can't hear everything put out by a normal tweeter and a super-tweeter will be invisible to you.

As others have said though, it's not the root of your problem anyway. The sounds that give 'sparkle' are lower in the frequency range.
 
I tried several add on supertweeter, unfortunately no easy answer as every speaker reacts differently. I had best results getting ‘Audiosmile’ to do a custom order, no more expensive than standard model. Their super tweeters are a uncommon design but highly recommended.
 


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