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Supertweeters-worth a punt?

I don't think your age will massively impact your ability to hear what the super-tweeters play to you.

For the record, i tried a pair of Townshend supers years ago and for love nor money couldn't hear any benefit. Even sent them back for a check over, which they did and reported them working fine

Sold them.

Would try them again as everything in terms of set up is different now, tried about nine years ago.
 
Unless you're a teenager, you are unlikely to be able to hear the upper reaches of what any standard tweeter puts out. If you hear a benefit from super-tweeters what you are provably enjoying is simply having more treble. KInda like an expensive tone control.

Can I hear a difference with super-tweeters plugged in? Yes, very slightly. Worth having? Nope. A solution looking for a problem.
 
Mr Pig said:
Unless you're a teenager, you are unlikely to be able to hear the upper reaches of what any standard tweeter puts out. If you hear a benefit from super-tweeters what you are provably enjoying is simply having more treble. KInda like an expensive tone control.

Can I hear a difference with super-tweeters plugged in? Yes, very slightly. Worth having? Nope. A solution looking for a problem.
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I wondered about this. My battered ears can't pick up anything past ~14k.

I assumed supertweeters only put out dog whistle type stuff but it looks like they start to rise at roughly 7k-ish which I would hear as a difference. But as you say my existing speakers could do this perfectly well if I fed them an appropriately EQed signal.

Townshend-Supertweeters-Frequency-response-.gif

https://www.townshendaudio.com/supertweeters/
 
paulfromcamden said:
I assumed supertweeters only put out dog whistle type stuff but it looks like they start to rise at roughly 7k-ish which I would hear as a difference.
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The bottom line is that if supertweeters only produced sound above the range of standard tweeters, non of the people who can afford to buy them would be able to hear them. Audiophiles might like to kid themselves on that they can magically hear these ultra high frequencies but they're talking rubbish. All they are hearing is more of the lower frequencies their standard speakers are already producing. There may be phase or dispersal effects that are pleasing but that's it.
 
My understanding is that you shouldn’t hear the super tweeters, you crank them up until you do then back them off till you can’t. I listened to the Townshend Audio tweeters, you can’t hear them but put a piece of card in front of them to do an A/B comparison, the improvement in the bass and soundstage is staggering
 
A lot of this sounds like audiophile bull to me. You can't hear them but they improve the air? Tighten up the bass? What a load of...
 
Beobloke said:
They can also tighten up the bass, which surprises a lot of people!
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At a Winter CES show in the early 1980s, a manufacturer of subwoofers called RH Labs had a room with a pair of Acoustat speakers and their RH sub. For two days they had many compliments on how "tight" the bass was. On the last day of the show they discovered that the subwoofer amp wasn't plugged in, but the crossover was, so they'd been demonstrating with nothing below 100Hz.
 
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