Harsh Tweeters Hard Sound

Harsh Tweeters Hard Sound

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIlDgqOR7do

Another really nice budget gem tweeter is the SEAS 27TFFNC/G. It’s a soft dome small format that essentially is almost the same as the much more costly version in the Lotus line. For what they cost and perform being able to buy a Norwegian made tweeter is pretty astounding. I don’t understand why I see people constantly putting them up for sale on forums when they are only about $100 for a pair and can easily yield nice results again by using proper amounts of EQ. It’s going to likely be that way for anything else much more expensive having to use EQ but you can only lead a horse to water and whether they drink it is purely up to them…

Thank you for taking the time to create these informative videos. I started professionally installing in the early 1980s and ended up working at Pioneer Electronics for 6 yrs in the early 90s. I built their demo car fleet, operated the National installation Training School and participated in the development of new products, including the GMH series of amplifiers, the IMPP woofers and the ODR digital system. To this day, one of my favourite parts of an installation process is the tuning; especially when it’s a simple system and the customer has a modest budget. This means eq is typically a last resort. I have had very good ongoing success with crossover frequency, phasing and slope management to address sound quality. Phasing between driver pairs (tweeters and midrange; or midrange and woofers) seems to be the most common area where instant improvement can often be found. Thanks also for quantifying and describing the various descriptions of sound perception. Very helpful and I look forward to seeing more of your videos. Regards, Paul from Toronto, Canada.

SB Acoustics SB21RDC-C000-4 Ring Dome Tweeter – “Ring radiator tweeters offer superior break-up modes compared to similar dome diaphragm models. This means the upper frequency range tends to be cleaner (lower distortion) and offers more extended response than similar conventional dome tweeters”. This is one of my favorite “mid-priced” and affordable tweeters. SB Acoustics is “the shit”. lol Thanks for the video.

This trend of categorizing different tweeter dome materials from various companies as bright, harsh, smooth etc is really from an era of car audio from 1990’s to early 2010’s. At those times due to very limited EQ capabilities found within HU’s, rarity of dedicated DSP’s, and most certainly limited access to affordable measuring mics and free software like REW, the average hobbyist was just tuning by ear and almost flying blind as they say. It makes sense to label tweeters this way without easy enough ability to actually measure what in car response was. Back then shops only had bulky, archaic RTA’s from Audio Control or some other brand and charged alot to tune with them since those units sometimes costed $thousands of dollars to buy. Using laptops with USB mics and software has only become available some 10-15 years now and really has only become more widespread in the last 8 years. So again hobbyists often just had to tune by ear trial and error using the limited number of treble bands in an aftermarket HU to hopefully smooth out the problem areas. Therefore tweeter swapping for hard domes and soft domes searching for the satisfactory result happened alot and still does to this day.

This was amazing! I just upgraded the sound in my 2010 Honda Fit and I was at odds with the Focal Auditor RSE-165s that I bought for the front with their own tweeters and crossovers. I’m fortunate though to have also bought a head unit with parametric eq adjustment. I did the -6.0db adjustment and Q of 1 at the 5kHz point, and I noticed a genuine improvement in the “brightness” of these tweeters. This video I believe has saved my setup and I can look forward to enjoying it now more. Thank you!

Cone breakup in the midrange speaker was the main cause of harshness in my install. I swapped it for cheaper infinity speakers, and crossed over miss and tweeters further apart so there’s a scoop or recess between 1-2.2kHz. Basically, using the crossover as a slight eq adjustment worked great. I only run off head unit, no sound processor, and only has a standard restricted eq sliders at preset frequencies. Time alignment also helped a lot. After having time alignment, I can’t live without it. All that paired with tweeters on axis right at your ears, gives a super sweet, pleasant, high resolution kind of sound, even from basic speakers. (Doors fully treated too) if anyone’s wondering, the nvx components, second up from their cheapest set, was the culprit (just the woofer). The tweeters from that set are the best I’ve ever tried though, so I trust their tweeters a lot.

Until now I always preferred soft fabric tweeters, they usually have good air and low harshness or over sharpness, but I never use speaker grill, and I design speakers for living rooms, not car audio. Much older focal tweeters like titanium and ti-oxyd especially those with a phase plug were very sweet but detailed. When I tune, I prefer to not use filters, instead I use a dbx driverack PA2 and output to 3 amps. I tune each driver in its cabinet, and then I tune with all playing pink noise at listening level and listening position, this enable me to spot problems that arise from the room and the crossover areas. Most of my tuning usually is putting down peaks, it is extremely rare that I have to boost something, most speakers are used on-axis. I also use cables from benchmark media, as I had some bad experiences either with home-made or from brands of cables. Usually my best experience is making nice 2 way speakers with 2 subs. I like to put the low crossover to around 128hz because it is an area where most pieces of furniture or windows are causing problems so it is a frequency I tend to keep low, while around 40hz is a source of pleasure. The high crossover is highly speaker dependent. How do you measure distortion ?

The problem with EQ is that it usually entails phase shift. At some point, phase shift becomes audible.

Thank you for raising this painful topic. In my setup, treble harshness is the last remaining problematic point. Bass could be better, but it’s fine. However with treble I cannot get rid of harshness by equalizing to a flat target. My current tune involves a certain (quite significant) treble roll off. And it’s a trade off by itself, such rolloff is not my preference, it also degrades sonic quality by itself a little bit. I could test better for distortion, but my measurements so far do not indicate any major problems. And I suspect that this perceived harshness with ‘flat’ eq could be due to reflections. I’m not sure if this theory is correct, but there are some clues. First, harshness is present in other setups – in a stock car system of my second car, for example. Also, it is apparent to me in binaural demos by pssound (where, obviously, a much higher quality setup is in place, compared to mine). Another hint is that rolling the windows down reduces the said harshness significantly. So far I experimented with different target curves, various stages of treble roll off, different tweeters (the latter resulted in no difference). I’m curious if I’m missing something (probably), or if it is an inherent issue due to reflections. And reflections I cannot really address.

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Harsh Tweeters Hard Sound

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