Paper Based Speaker Cone Question

Sounds like you have pre-buyers remorse. Audionote speakers have/had paper cones. Many prefer paper due to its vocal naturalness.   

Yes they can and my experience has been the Ohm Walshes are very durable.   

Some of the finest speakers ever made have used and still use pulp cones.....Sonus Faber , JBL,  Aerial to name a few

Paper can be great.  You should not disqualify a speaker because it has paper drivers.

Paper remains one of the best materials for cones. The light mass contributes to efficiency and fast transients. The material also has inherent damping properties, so no ringing issues. Some of the most expensive drivers in the world are made of various paper compounds.

Yes, the stiffer cone materials tend to suffer from high frequency ring, and this temporal smear can be idealized by the brain as micro detail.

When in fact, it is just noise. It also masks signal, in that smear. false detail, and lost detail, as a pair. There are benefits via better tracing of details below those hf smearing bits, but a loss is a loss.


A paper cone suffers a different type of smear, a lossy wideband smear on the initial transient functions which kills motions toward transient resonant smear (the stiff exotic cone fault), in most cases... which can be combined with some of the problems that the stiffer exotic cone materials have (too stiff an impregnated paper, getting it back to the exotic cone problems). It depends on the cone design and implementation.

Basically, all materials in use have flaws, some more than others. It depends quite a bit on the driver designer and how mentally clear they are in what they re trying to do, and how good their hearing is. Of course, how intelligent they are in applying the given package of skills into driver design, is part of that....

I believe that paper is still the most life-like sounding cone material. No other material I've heard yet comes closer to creating the illusion of a natural tone. The vast majority of speaker cones still use it - from extreme budget to extreme high end. 

Implementation is critical of course, as usual. The only thing that would concern me is the durability of the cone surround. Rubber tends to last a lot longer than foam which tends to disintegrate after a number of years etc.

It's not obvious what material Walsh use 
in their surrounds from their website. Give them a call first if you're unsure.  

^ Paper cones are often paired with a doped paper or fabric surround. 

It may be considered a matter of preference but I myself often prefer paper cone material for its organic sound. I know that sounds like I'm a vegan or something but paper cones can do some things better than other material. Poly cones, kevlar, etc tend to provide a very black background and can be more punchy with electronic music but if you listen to jazz, classical or you prefer the "wooden" sound of John Bonham's drum kit, paper cones will give you a sound that is closer to the actual performance in my opinion. DALI even puts wood chips in some of their drivers for this very reason.

My AN-J's have paper mid/woofers and I could not be happier. Natural sounding detailed and musical in the extreme. I will probably stick with AN speakers and paper drivers in the future if I ever decide to change or upgrade.

I find the Mother of Tone web site to be an outstanding reference toward the understanding of this subject - this page in particular:

http://www.mother-of-tone.com/vibration.htm

... but especially the following page:

http://www.mother-of-tone.com/mother.htm

But read at your own risk, as you will not be the same after.

Some of the best sounding speakers ever made had paper cones. Paper will outlast any other speaker cone material and can survive hundreds of years. Any other questions?

There are $50 speakers that use Kevlar and 100k speakers that use paper and vice versa. The cost of the enclosure is much greater than the driver. 

Tannoy uses paper cones.....some believe that the sound of music takes on the properties or characteristics of the material used to construct the cone. 

First consider the question in context….of a true Walsh driver…if you understand how they work the waveform must propagate along the driver surface, so a stiff non pistonic cone is ideal.

in a more conventional box speaker / driver arrangement, IF you want the output to look like the input, you want a pistonic driver.  IF the speaker / driver designer is focused on recreating the input aka music without distortion, they will have to get creative with various exotic materials like aluminum, bextrene, doping, kevlar, carbon, balsa wood, etc…. None of which constitute a free lunch.

The key here is output = input, otherwise you are buying a tone control you like… nothing wrong with that…. Audiophile know thyself….

Jim

 

Paper can be superb.  I currently use paper cone ScanSpeak midwoofers.  They are a little high tech in that they use a multi-layer, composite resin construction but don't look down on paper cones.  In the Ohm designs I believe that they are needed to break up, deliberately.

Seventeen years ago when i horse traded for a pair of AER BD3 8" paper cone drivers to use in my Oris 150 horns I got a great deal on them.  I certainly couldn't afford to buy them new now since these 8" paper cone drivers list for $11,325.00 a pair plus shipping from Europe and import duties.  They sound wonderful.

Agree that paper and carbon fiber coated paper drivers are outstanding.

I prefer the paper ’sound’ in the midrange especially. Just more natural and organic for lack of a better term.

That said, the current Ohm speakers are sadly just not very good. Plastic/poly driver, diffuse and muffled sounding. Not high end in any area. None worth even $1K/pair. My opinion.

The old Model F was good for when/what it was (given appropriate power), Dale Harder’s HHR speakers are a good updated omnidirectional design as are German Physiks.

 

A well damped pistonic (stiff) cone will be superior to any paper cone. 

I dont agree. Some of the best dynamic midrange drivers I have heard had base material of paper. As others have mentioned it is all about the design and implementation. Rarely is one design always better than another is this hobby. 

 

With Ohms what you need to determine is if you like the sound of an omni or not. I, for one, have never heard an omni that I really liked, but I do understand the attraction.  

I have several pair speaker with paper they very good. My ear solid gold so I tell you nothing worry. My ear hair made diamond. My wife sister prefer waterbed to coil I think that even more drastic compare.