Yes, the materials matter. But the implementation matters more.
Just gotta get Amir some $15K Yamaha NS-5000s to test.Check "Zylon" (which by the way, used to make Dyneema under a different name and now branded "Izanas").
Yep >> you found it.
I don't think any cones are near their elastic limit, so in terms of engineering stronger is not needed, the dynamic behaviour will be dominated by stiffness and damping.Next tendency are stronger materials > PBO / Zylon.
But you may know that it's extremely difficult to coat Pe and a composite would be way too heavy.
YES. If you want to know a little more about the many many properties that are relevant, start with the AES Loudspeaker Anthology going back to the 1940's and follow the research. It is not as simple as "piston" or even "breakup".
What matters of course is the end result and what each company can do with their chosen material. What you read is what the advertising department can make up as they don't have a clue what the engineers actually did.
What has changed since the '40's is not the science. We knew what we needed back then. What changed is materials technology. The goal being infinitely light, infinitely rigid, infinitely non resonant, and dirt cheap. Not only mutually exclusive parameters, but physically impossible. The answer is what tradeoffs are the best combination for the specific use case.
Any generalization on raw material properties, as above, only describes the material, not the end product.
I keep wondering if an aero-jell is to fragile.
Plasma has zero mass.... not sure how stiff it is https://www.lansche-audio.com/products/plasmatweeter/you want a perfectly stiff material with zero mass
I don't think any cones are near their elastic limit, so in terms of engineering stronger is not needed, the dynamic behaviour will be dominated by stiffness and damping.
"Corona Plasma" is not the best name to choose nowadays ...Plasma has zero mass.... not sure how stiff it is https://www.lansche-audio.com/products/plasmatweeter/
Sadly i can't find the link at the moment, but i remember an interview with a Neumann engineer. He basically said that they use conventional plastic or doped paper woofers because fancier materials are more expensive for too little benefit. Looking at the kind of performance they get out of their drivers, it seems like there is hardly any need for fancy materials .
Although i could imagine that high-end drivers make it easier to design good speakers because there are fewer flaws you need to take into account. And they might help when designing within severe formfactor/optics constraints which requires drivers with unusual operating ranges.
Plasma has zero mass
That "unsmoothed" response curve looks to me like an ungated in-room curve, meaning that the room's reflections are included, in which case they are almost certainly responsible for the "grass". If that is the indeed case, then imo neither the smoothed nor unsmoothed curves are giving us high-resolution insight into the behaviors of the drivers themselves. For that, we either need anechoic data, time-gated data, or very close-miked data (the latter being what Amir's speaker measurement system generates).