WILSON ALEXANDRIA XLF SPEAKERS-

No focal tweeter anymore.

Maybe no soft dome tweeter available at the time was good enough ? Just a thought.

Razmika - do I sense an irony here ?

I have owned speakers using Scan Speak 2010, 9300, 9500, 9700 silk dome tweeters (at the time considered to be the best), various electostats, the previous top of the range Scan Speak Ring radiator (the one with silver tip), Accuton ceramic tweeters (in Avalon Eidolon speakers) and now the Sasha, to my ears, the latest incarnation of Wilson tweeter is better than those (pls note that I'm specificly referring to Sasha/Maxx 3 tweeter, not earlier Wilsons designs).

Ofc, there is always a question of personal taste etc, so I'm not gonna say that 'it is the best'. But I think it is absolutely incorrect to state that it is 'good distance away from todays best'. This is simply not true.

Plus, please remember that it is difficoult, if not impossible, to judge the tweeter performance with no relation to the system in which the given tweeter is to be used !

Ribbon tweeter, for example, may be better at some freq (even Wilson used a bunch of them in the WAMM, remember ?), but then it needs to be crossed over much higher. That would probably mean you would have to use another, smaller midrange unit (like it was done in the WAMM, or you can see in Verity Lohengrin for example) or you would have to compromise the all important midrange ... you see, it is all a question of balance and a chosen set of compromises and design goals. There is no free lunch.

From what I undersood from my talks with Dave Wilson, he likes the tweeters with have low resonant freq and high power handling, which allows him to cross them over relatively low. That rules out all ceramic drivers (which also have other problems ...), and most silk dome ones.

I have asked Dave once, why they have used (then) top of the line Scan Speak Ring Radiator tweeter in the Alexandria as an 'ambience' tweeter. His answer was simple - because its cheaper than the titanium tweeter and gets the job done.

Same goes for the Duette monitors, which also have the Scan Speak silk dome tweeter (although this time the cheaper one, with wide surround but not the 'wave guide' tip).

So as you can see, Dave Wilson is clearly not someone living in his cave, he have used in the past and still uses various tweeter designs, including silk dome tweeters, but for various reasons preferes the inverted dome titanium tweeter over other alternatives.