What are the differences in Tweeter materials?

Mezzanine,

How come you didn't include camel hair tweeters in you list of soft dome materials?

Kijanki,

I think you just P**** Off quite a few speaker companies. Looks like you just cracked the secret industry list price multiplier formula.

"Something I said in my post that offended you? Do you really have to respond in such a rude manner to a normal question I asked? "

I have no idea why you would say that. What part of my post offended you?

Mezzanine,

I'm glad you posted. My comment about the secret pricing structure, I hope, was taken just as some light hearted humour, and nothing more. Someone always seems to be complaining and/or joking about the high cost of some equipment, I just couldn't resist.

Unless I misread your post, it looked like you were trying to compare some of the more common materials to some of the more rare/exotic ones, with an emphasis on soft tweeters. API (Audio Products International), the parent company of several Canadian high end speaker manufacturers (Mirage, Energy, Paradigm, PSB and Athena are the ones I can remember. There may be others as well), make camel hair tweeters. They put them in Energy speakers and I think the original Mirage M series. I know several people that have these tweeters and swear by them. I'm not sure if they are currently going into any speakers but I'm pretty sure you can still buy the raw drivers.

"Just a general observation: I've heard plenty of metal-dome tweeters that sound the way soft domes are reputed to sound, and I've heard plenty of soft-domed tweeters that sound the way metal domes are reputed to sound. I don't think you can make generalizations about the sound character of one or the other.
-Bob"

Very interesting post. I understand what you are saying but can you give some examples? For me, getting the high frequencies right, is one of my most important goals when setting up a system. Overall, I tend to prefer non metal tweeters. If you've found some exceptions to how metal tweeters typically sound, I'd really like to check them out myself. So far, I've never heard a metal tweeter that goes that far as to sound like a soft dome.