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Wolf (Ben) and Matt came down for the day yesterday. Ben brought his new little towers named the "Nephilia". These used a HiVi woofer and the large Airborne AMT tweeter. After listening to the Testarossa's a while with their final crossovers (not the ones they had a InDIYana), we switched over the Nephilia. These speakers were wonderful with a beautifully balanced presentation. Their tonal balance was as natural as anything I have heard. Frequency response measurements confirmed an exceptionally flat on-axis response (I didn't take any off-axis). The Testarossa's had more slam and were more dynamic sounding. They also seemed to have better resolution of detail, but considering the cost difference the Nephilia did very well. There are a lot of much more expensive speakers out there that couldn't touch these. Ben's crossover tuning was perfect; these were ruler flat through the crossover and the drivers blended really well. He did an excellent job on the bass tuning too. Like a lot of rooms mine has a midbass peak to it and this blended well with Ben's speakers to make then sound fairly impressive for a single 6" driver. Ben has a switch on his crossover to switches between two different capacitors of the same value in tweeter highpass circuit. It's any interesting test as there is definitely a change in how they sounded depending on which cap was used. (As life would have it, I preferred the sound with the cheaper cap).
We headed out for lunch at a local grill in the neighborhood and when we returned we got down to some tweeter measurements. Ben also brought down his Transducer Labs Magnesium tweeters and I brought out the Berylliums for comparison. We measured frequency response and distortion for both and compared them using my egg-crate foam and thick felt tweeter set-up. The Berylliums were a bit more sensitive but frequency response and distortion overlaid each remarkably well. Obviously, we didn't listen to them in a system with music, but I would think it would be hard to tell them apart based on the measurements.
Since we had it set-up without making any changes in mic position or drive level I switch out the two Transducer Labs tweeters, a Scanspeak Aircirc 660000, Morel ET448, Morel CAT308, Dayton RS28f, and an Airborne RT4001. I captured distortion profiles on each of these under identical conditions at a level that was about 105 dB (which was loud, and I didn't want to push it any higher). This gave us some interesting results. Any guesses on which tweeter has the lowest Total Harmonic Distortion above 2 khz? How about lowest 3rd order? I kinda wish now that I had pulled out the SB26's too just to see how they did.
All in all, it was a fun day. I appreciate Ben and Matt making the drive. I heard some great music I was unfamiliar with too that I will now have to add to the collection. Thanks for day guys.
Jeff B.
We headed out for lunch at a local grill in the neighborhood and when we returned we got down to some tweeter measurements. Ben also brought down his Transducer Labs Magnesium tweeters and I brought out the Berylliums for comparison. We measured frequency response and distortion for both and compared them using my egg-crate foam and thick felt tweeter set-up. The Berylliums were a bit more sensitive but frequency response and distortion overlaid each remarkably well. Obviously, we didn't listen to them in a system with music, but I would think it would be hard to tell them apart based on the measurements.
Since we had it set-up without making any changes in mic position or drive level I switch out the two Transducer Labs tweeters, a Scanspeak Aircirc 660000, Morel ET448, Morel CAT308, Dayton RS28f, and an Airborne RT4001. I captured distortion profiles on each of these under identical conditions at a level that was about 105 dB (which was loud, and I didn't want to push it any higher). This gave us some interesting results. Any guesses on which tweeter has the lowest Total Harmonic Distortion above 2 khz? How about lowest 3rd order? I kinda wish now that I had pulled out the SB26's too just to see how they did.
All in all, it was a fun day. I appreciate Ben and Matt making the drive. I heard some great music I was unfamiliar with too that I will now have to add to the collection. Thanks for day guys.
Jeff B.
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