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Midrange dome drivers banned ?

Probably redundant but SB makes a 2.5” dome with interesting response curve per manufacturer. Morel has two 2” domes plus a dome + tweeter module. I have the Morel Elite 2” in active 3 way. Vocals and piano sound very fine. Crossover at 800 and 3,500.
 
News: Dayton has what seems to be a new 2" dome midrange with a carbon fiber diaphragm and an optionally closely-spaced tweeter in a faceplate. Measurements on Scott Hinson's FB page show the distortion is quite low even down to 500 Hz (>40 dB headroom), which is quite good for a dome like this:

 
Vifa/Peerless did have a coaxial ring radiator designed at one point. I've seen the patent images or the technical drawing a while back. Essentially it was another 2 rolls to make the annular midrange just larger and adjacent the current known tweeter like the XT25SC90.

It may not have been as viable in testing due to how the RR operates and the fairly poor off axis responses they tend to have. Annular midranges of the past have seemed to be very limited bandwidth, even worse than dome mids at lower frequencies. They also have a strictly limited Sd parameter, so depends largely on how loud they can play as well.

With the BMS et al, there is one voice coil, and a special shape diaphragm. This drives 2 different horn flares at the same time. I understand why they call it coaxial, but to me it is less so than your average coincident driver.
 
Remembered one : HiVi 1s
Just for fun it also includes a circular "ribbon" or planar tweeter I guess

Screenshot_2025-01-28-00-09-32-08_e4424258c8b8649f6e67d283a50a2cbc.jpg
 
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News: Dayton has what seems to be a new 2" dome midrange with a carbon fiber diaphragm and an optionally closely-spaced tweeter in a faceplate. Measurements on Scott Hinson's FB page show the distortion is quite low even down to 500 Hz (>40 dB headroom), which is quite good for a dome like this:


The mid dome looks like a good performer but the tweeter looks kinda crappy.
 
has there ever been a ring radiator midrange driver or a larger version of that sb dome tweeter with the dimple in the middle

 

In France, Cabasse is a major specialist in annular concentric HP. He has been using HPs of his own design and manufacture for at least 30 years if not more.


Atlantis in 1991
 
News: Dayton has what seems to be a new 2" dome midrange with a carbon fiber diaphragm and an optionally closely-spaced tweeter in a faceplate. Measurements on Scott Hinson's FB page show the distortion is quite low even down to 500 Hz (>40 dB headroom), which is quite good for a dome like this:

I'm looking at that design and I'm thinking that you can get to 500 Hz at the low end and probably 3000 Hz+ at the high end with a 2" or 3" driver. It also seems to me that the using two waveguides to match directivity for a 2/3" mid and a tweeter doesn't pose significant challenges considering the sizes of the drivers.

Furthermore a waveguided 2/3" with modern materials should be quite capable in terms of power handling and could be matched with and 8" or 9" quite easily.

A small medium driver with decent power handling looks to me a natural way to match directivites without having to much to compensate for in enclosure and waveguide design. It's somewhat surprising to me that there aren't that many designs using that configuration. I can think of the MUM, Adam Audio, Neumann on the monitor side and Philarmonic even if they are using it in an MTM configuration) on the domestic side. And tbh, I don't know how well MUM is using that driver choice to control directivity.

In any case, it seems like 4", 5" and even 6" are more common for mid range drivers.
 
Domed midrange drivers aren't banned at my house, I need them collecting dust!
Altec Lansing 508's.
ahhh the good ole dayz

Edit, I'm just reminiscing as the original owner for approximately forty years. Yikes, lol.
Yeah, I had to replace the woofer surrounds some years ago.


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Domed midrange drivers aren't banned at my house, I need them collecting dust!
Altec Lansing 508's.
ahhh the good ole dayz


View attachment 424264
The history of Altec Lansing's downward trajectory:
In 1958 the Altec Lansing Corporation was purchased by James Ling who made it part of LTV Ling Altec. LTV spun off Altec which it loaded down with debt first. By 1974, the company was saddled with debt. It was reorganized under Chapter 11 as Altec Corporation and continued for 10 years. Altec filed a second bankruptcy. In 1984, Gulton Industries purchased the brand out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Gulton was acquired by Mark IV Audio. Since then, there has been a string of owners, purchased in 1986 by Sparkomatic,[7] with the Pro equipment still made by Mark IV Audio, Mark IV sold out to Telex, who closed down the Pro division and folded its products into Electro-Voice. In 2005 Altec Lansing Technologies was acquired by Plantronics, 2009 bought by Prophet Equity, and has been owned since 2012 by the Infinity Group, a company which acquires struggling companies.
 
I stopped using midrange drivers a long time ago because the lower crossover point from the woofer to the midrange driver was in too critical a frequency range within the audio band, and was always too easy for me and others to hear as a discontinuity, and find distracting. I am a believer in the expression that "there is no crossover, like no crossover", but unfortunately every single full range driver that I have ever heard fell well short of expectations, and had too many discontinuities in the highs, nor enough bass - and so ended up adding subwoofers crossed over fairly high plus add-on super-tweeters to sound OK - but the overall response of the full range driver was still quite bumpy.

Accordingly, in my own design work a compromise evolved. I began to use stereo subwoofers crossed over below 80Hz, which is a non-critical crossover point to the ear, and then I crossover the mid-woofer in the main speakers to the tweeter in the main speakers higher than normal at around 3.5KHz, which is again a better place for a crossover point. Not having any crossover point in the critical center band (80Hz to 3.5KHz) has been a great improvement in my opinion. Today there are an abundance of mid-woofers that I have found can cover this range very nicely.
Try not inverting the mid-range and add a filler driver:

ω²/(s² + 2ζωs + ω²) + 2ζωs/(s² + 2ζωs + ω²) + s²/(s² + 2ζωs + ω²) = 1

For L-R ζ= 1 (Q = 0.5) but you can also use Butterworth or Bessel and the response will still be flat at the crossover because it still adds up to 1 irrespective of the value of ζ. And, the phase of the sum is linear at 0 degrees. What I have read you probably want Zobel on the filler driver.
 
If I were strongly inclined to use a dome midrange in a 3-way speaker, I would consider this dome by Peerless/Tymphany available through PE:

https://www.parts-express.com/Peerless-GBS-85N25PR03-04-3-1-2-Paper-Cone-Midrange-4-Ohm-264-1494

The diameter is better than it is with the more common 2" domes, but not by as much as you might think if you focus on the "3 1/2" description. The specifications from the manufacturer indicate that the "effective" dome diameter is 6.7 mm = 2.64", and this most likely includes some of the surround. However the slight improvement in diameter gives it a significant improvement in piston area, 35 cm^2 vs. 28 cm^2 for the more common 2.125" dome midrange. The linear excursion is given as 2.1 mm, twice greater than the typical 1 mm value for a 2" dome. The net effect of the advantage in piston diameter and linear excursion is that the advantage in volume displacement is 2.1 x 35/28 = 2.6. With volume displacement 2 1/2 times greater than it is with a typical 2" midrange, this dome midrange should be usable a octave lower, to perhaps 500 Hz, depending on how loud you want it to play. This is low enough in frequency that it would not be unreasonable to build a 3-way speaker using this dome midrange.

The reason for the greater linear displacement probably is more about the motor than the suspension. The coil height is not stated in the specs, but the gap height is given as 3 mm. Together with the low DCV, this suggests that the motor is probably underhung, i.e., that the coil height is probably about 1 mm, about the same as it typically is with a tweeter. Interestingly, the coil diameter is given as 25.7 mm, just barely more than 1", which obviously means that the coil former joins to the dome not at the edge of the dome but rather slightly inward from the edge of the dome. If the manufacturer's graph of frequency response is to be believed, it is extremely flat from about 150 Hz to 2 kHz. It would be interesting to see measurements of distortion for this driver, because it may well be the ideal midrange to fill the directivity gap between a 6" or 7" woofer and a typical 1" tweeter. For a woofer larger than this, I would still go with a larger midrange.

There is also a true 3" soft dome by ScanSpeak, however it seems to offer minimal advantage over the smaller domes because the linear excursion is .8 mm. It uses an overhung motor with coil height 2.9 mm and gap height 2 mm. This is a little surprising given that the coil is 3" in diameter. This suggest a somewhat high value for DCR of the coil and somewhat low efficiency and sensitivity. DCR is 5.7 ohm and sensitivity is quoted as 92 dB. However this quoted sensitivity value is very misleading because the response has a horrific peak. To be usable down to 500 Hz the peak will have to be squashed and the effective sensitivity will only be about 85 dB, not so good. The peakiness of the response will be further exacerbated by the high Q of the driver unless the enclosure for it is impossibly large, because total Q is 1.73. The same issue is encountered to a lesser extent with the Peerless dome, which is similarly open in the back, but which has Qts .63. While this is greater than is to be desired it is usable, even though it wants to be given as much volume as can be allocated to it. (Qts is greater than the maximum value at which the enclosure volume would be less than Vas for resulting system Q of .7; Vas is 1.6 liter. This suggests that in a typical application its response will likely exhibit a modest peak at the low end, however it should not be difficult to correct this in the applied high-pass filter.)

Once again the fundamental limitation of large domes becomes apparent. The large diameter of the coil implies greater mass and larger DCR, which confounds good efficiency and sensitivity. It is manifest that the motor should be underhung to avoid this fundamental drawback, but even when the coil is short, sensitivity is barely acceptable without using larger diameter for the coil wire, and larger diameter for the coil wire increases the mass, such that it ends up sort of like a dog chasing its tail so to speak. Ultimately in order to achieve a flat response to adequately high frequency it is necessary to use a coil that is both short and small in diameter, like Tymphany did with the GBS-85N25PR03-04. If I were wanting to build a 3-way speaker with a woofer not larger than 6.5", I would seriously consider using this dome midrange.
Braun/ADS sold speakers with 8 and 10 inch woofers. Perhaps the answer is for some company to clone their tweeter and mid-range; which appear to function well.
 

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So I did some research and the only 3" dome I could find that is underhung is the ATC SM75-150, and guess what? Not only is it pretty high sensitivity, it's also the only one that can acceptably be crossed below about 500hz (ATC crosses them at 380hz). It's also completely unavailable outside of their speakers. K&H did use it on the O500, but that is long since discontinued - though I hear it's an absolutely badass speaker.
The Ciare HM500 looks like it could be crossed at 500Hz and 5KHz although the less than flat response might need to be filtered a bit.

However the ADS L1590/2 was supposedly crossed at 350Hz. It had a 2 inch dome mid-range
 

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This is true.
Zylon almost certainly doesn't produce a dome without breakup in the audible range but can be made with a matrix (the polymer used to bond the fibres together) with far more damping than any metal so maybe keeping the in band peaks in check, like with any other soft dome.
IIRC, natural Silk is stronger than steel.
 
According to TAD, their CST Driver in TAD Reference One TAD-R1TX and TAD-CR1TX consists of coaxial 16 cm midrange corn (not dome) plus 3.5 cm tweeter dome, both "vacuum metal deposition" Beryllium metal. The say TAD is the only one company maintaining they production technology of that Be corn and dome;
https://tad-labs.com/jp/consumer/r1tx/
View attachment 146481

View attachment 146484


The CST Driver covers 250 Hz to ca. 100 kHz. The crossover from Be-corn to Be-dome tweeter is at 2 kHz, and hence the Be-corn (not dome though) covers 250 Hz to 2 kHz.
View attachment 146479

I really would like to listen to (very much expensive) TAD-R1TX at their studio in Tokyo when the COVID-19 pandemic would be well subsided.
Could someone vapor deposit taC (tetrahedral amorphous Carbon) instead. Would that be more or less expensive? Note that is the proper name for Diamond coating.
 
Could someone vapor deposit taC (tetrahedral amorphous Carbon) instead. Would that be more or less expensive? Note that is the proper name for Diamond coating.
Sorry, but at present, at least, I myself have no knowledge nor information on such technology...
 
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Could someone vapor deposit taC (tetrahedral amorphous Carbon) instead. Would that be more or less expensive?

Why diamond coating? Why not produce a solid dome from such material through a plasma separation process?

BD90-6-727.jpg


And, yes, it is expensive, at least in its 5" iteration with a 3.5" inverted dome.
 
Costs as much as a car. I think Marten is already using it.
 
IIRC, natural Silk is stronger than steel.
Silk is also highly elastic, making it really tough. I'm not sure how that plays in to its use in soft domes.
 
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