Joseph Audio Pearl 3 to 20/20 Graphene Upgrade

I was told by a nationally recognized speaker designer that graphene
coatings are  being employed to strengthen the cone more than for
any real sonic benefit. Now getting anyone to admit that will be a challenge.
Maybe Spatial Audio's owner ? Clayton 

Yeah, I think the graphene coating thing itself is more of a convenient marketing thing, with likely very little sonic consequence.


However, SEAS did re-design the driver in various other ways for better performance (which is why Jeff Joseph had to re-design the crossover).


People comparing the original vs graphene versions of the Pulsar and Perspective speakers seem to have pretty consistent impressions - "better" bass in terms of more punch and tighter, and slightly clearer midrange, a bit more mellow in the highs.


That said,  I can imagine the graphene upgrading making less difference in the Pearl vs the Pulsar and Perspectives.   The Pulsar/Perspectives rely entirely on the new graphene driver for the mids and bass, so any difference would likely to be noticed from the original drivers.   Where the Pearl only changes it's midrange driver to graphene, and has a couple bigger woofers doing bass.

I'm thinkin' SEAS probably know what they are doing in driver design ;-)

That's really interesting, maybe a call into SEAS is in order. On specs alone, it looks like the breakup frequency got pushed up 1.5K, which allowed Jeff to push the crossover point up from 2K to 2.5K it seems.

As for Pearl vs. Perspective/Pulsar, it's a good point that Pearl is a true 3 way with dedicated bass units. That being said the midrange is often the most critical for tonality, so a meaningful upgrade in that region would still be great. The SEAS Excel W18EX003 driver costs about $1000 a pair, but the upgrade costs 5x that much, so really want to get a sense of how tangible the improvement could be.

I’ve heard both and have the Pulsars (v1). To me, the graphene’s bass sounds a bit more bloated than the v1s. That may be acceptable if the graphene’s are placed in a large room, but it likely will overload a small one. For me, the graphene upgrade didn’t improve the sound, so I passed on it. Just because something is new and improved, doesn’t make it better. Of course, YMMV.

Resurfacing this thread to see if anyone else have feedback

Hopefully I'll have a chance soon to listen to the large Pearl Graphene this week. Will keep you posted.