Townshend Maximum Supertweeters


Yes, Maximum. I don’t come up with the names, I just review the stuff, okay? ;) And I got em because everyone keeps telling me I should, and once again they are right. Whew! That was easy!

Kidding! We will now laboriously delve into why you cannot live without these tweeters, that you can’t even hear.

For sure I can’t. My hearing rolls off somewhere north of 15k. If that. These things extend to 90k. Why? What difference can it possibly make?

Who knows? And since when has that stopped me?

So out they come and what have we here? Two heavy black bricks, with a screen on the front and a couple binding posts on the back. In between the posts is a little knob you use to turn them off and set the levels. On the bottom are rudimentary rubber dimple feet. Guess I was expecting Pods or something, this being Townshend. No such luck.

They go on top of the Moabs. Well there is already a BDR Shelf on top, and a HFT dead center right where this thing is supposed to go. Moving HFT even an inch changes the sound so executive decision, the Maximum Supertweeters go just outboard of the HFT. They are first just placed there not even connected, just in case this somehow messes with the sound. It doesn’t.

Okay so now you need to know my system is all messed up. No, not the usual mess I mean really seriously messed up. No turntable. Chris Brady has the bearing for some resurfacing and stuff. So we are slumming with the heavily modded Oppo. Not to fear, Ted Denney sent me some of his latest Atmosphere X (review to come) which with the right tuning bullet the Oppo now sounds....digital. Oh well. KBO.

The usual: Demag. Warmup. Listen a while. Hook em up. What level? Who knows? Moabs are 98dB. How ya gonna know anyway? How can it even matter? How do you even set the level of something you can’t hear? Level 3, good as any. Plug em in. No change. Not the slightest peep out of these things. Total dud. Knew it. Sit back down.

What the...? No way. There is not the slightest hint of top end coming from these things. They may as well not be there at all. Except the whole presentation is somehow different. Top to bottom. No way!

I get up and turn the black magic off. Sit back down. Crap. Flat, grainy, digital. Turn em back on. Deep, liquid, analog.

No, not analog like my turntable. They are just supertweeters after all not magic. But way more analog than it was. More dimensional, more solid, more liquid detailed. More black between the notes, and in the black it is now easier to hear the natural acoustic decay. I do NOT want to go back to listening to CD without this! I cannot wait to hear it with my table.

And I haven’t even had time to get them dialed in yet!



128x128millercarbon

Showing 4 responses by pjb255livecom

I only stream content, and I'm intrigued by the prospect of adding these, but I'm struggling to understand how these devices can produce any ultrasonic content when - correct me if I'm wrong - ultrasonic content is filtered out in the the A-to-D process. Am I missing something?
I'm far less impressionable than you insinuate. The 44.1k is in reference to the Nyquist theorem, i'll assume you're familiar with it.

Despite being a postulate more than a theorem, it continues to govern the slope of digital filtering applied to the sample frequency.

As such Redbook CD's have ZERO frequency content above 22khz. Supertweeters can offer no added value to them.

Analog - different story all together.

Understood, and agree. Convert is a better term here than recover. My assertion is that a supertweeter could only provide an improvement when the mastered sample rate exceeds 44.1, where the filtering can be applied more gently and allow some of the hypersonic frequencies to remain. It couldnt provide any improvement with 44.1khz-mastered CD's, because there is no hypersonic signal content on the CD. Analog - totally different story, but i do digital 100%, and most high res digital is a misrepresentation, so I'm not seeing how supertweeters provide any enhancement at this time for an all digital setup.
Miller Carbon. Maybe my question wasn't well phrased; I'm not questioning our ability to hear ultrasonic content, or the effect it might have on the 20-20k frequencies. My question asks "isnt (all) the ultrasonic content stripped out in the A-to-D conversion, and if so how would a supertweeter recover what was stripped out"?