Which Tweeter preferred- dome natural material, Beryllium/Metal or Planar Ribbon? Why?

Hi there @arion 

A'gon can be unfriendly to manufacturers so I'm glad you are here and look forward to your insights.  Pretty remarkable work to get an AMT to function that far down in the range.  Outstanding!

Best,

Erik

The best I’ve ever heard were plasma at the CES show 40 years ago. They were that memorable.

I’m afraid I’ve heard them, in a cramped hotel room of course, and wasn’t that impressed. It would be nice to hear them again in a more ideal setup.

@mofojo I’m sure i can’t give you a top 3 of each, but from what I’ve heard:

Top AMT: Beyma and Mundorf

Top Ring: Scanspeak. Even their relatively inexpensive Discovery R2604 is a stellar performer, and has made it into a number of megabuck speakers, Krell, Magico, YG and Sonus Faber (if memory serves) and some incarnation makes it into modern Polk speakers, and for good reason. Even the cheap units have very low distortion and stunning frequency response that flies by 20 kHz.

Top BE: Scanspeak Illuminator D3004, basis of Magico’s tweets.

I’ve not heard Satori’s Be tweets so I can’t really comment on it. I have heard another brand... Transducer labs? And was really not taken by it. TL has a big following including by at least one speaker maker I respect but I just don’t dig it.

I’m not a fan of the Focal inverted dome’s for lack of natural air. To me a good tweeter absolutely vanishes. The Focal’s make their presence known.

I do want to say again though, that we pay far too much attention to tweeters given what a small part of the energy of a speaker they actually reproduce.  Many listeners can't even tell if a tweeter stops working. The price is often out of proportion with their value, and yet, yes, I spent 2x as much on my tweeters as my mid-woofers.  😂

There are several specific world class tweeters I can think of.  

In every category including ring, AMT and Be there are absolute garbage examples of each, so I decline to answer.