What are tweeter speakers?

High end speakers - Advantages / disadvantages of horizontal midrange / tweeter mounting.?

• I'm building a pair of high end speakers. The midrange is an 8" direct radiator and the tweeter is a moderately horn loaded dome. I'm mulling over mounting the tweeter next to the midrange for space considerations instead of the conventional vertical mounting. I'm concerned both about comb filtering and the affects this may have on imaging. 2nd order crossover 2K.

• Answer:

  If you mount the drivers side by side then you're not building "high end" speakers because you would be compromising sound quality. The advantage of vertical mounting is for a more accurate soundstage(imaging). Ideally the midrange and tweeter voicecoils should be physically time-aligned on the same plane. The drivers should also be centered vertically as close together as possible but no more than the distance of one wavelength of the crossover frequency that divides them. So for a crossover point of 2kHz that would equate to around 6.75" between the voicecoils from center-to-center. The objective is to create "point source" sound or at least as close as possible when using multiple drivers. I assume that you meant you want to build a pair of 2-way speakers using an 8" woofer. With a 2nd order(12dB/octave) passive crossover network the normal tweeter response is 180 degrees out of phase from the woofer response at Fc. and causes a large dip in response at that frequency due to cancellations. This can be easily cured by reversing the polarity of the tweeter thus putting the two drivers back in phase with one another at the crossover frequency and smoothing out the dip. If space is limited then maybe you should consider either an 8" woofer that has a coaxial mounted compression horn or a quality fullrange driver. With a fullrange driver you wouldn't have to bother with any crossover. Hope this helps. Good luck.