Take the grille cover off almost any loudspeaker. You will usually see two or three
round speaker drivers. The big one is the woofer. It makes bass. The middle one is called the midrange, and the small round one is the tweeter. It reproduces high frequencies. Almost all speakers, 99%, have a round tweeter.
GoldenEar speakers do not have round tweeters.
They reproduce the critical high frequencies with a completely different technology. This tweeter is called a Heil Air Motion Transformer, or AMT, or as Sandy Gross of GoldenEar called it, a HVFH, or High Velocity Folded Horn tweeter.
The Heil tweeter is a folded, very thin sheet of plastic, like Saran wrap. It is folded like an accordion. Unfold it, and it is about 6 or 7 inches wide by about 3 inches. That's a surface area of over 20 square inches.
A typical 1 inch dome tweeter has a surface area of less than 1 square inch. Our ears depend of high frequencies, reproduced by tweeters, to determine where sound comes from. A baby's cry is high is frequency. We needed to know, as cave men, where those babies were to protect them. When a loudspeaker uses a round 1 inch tweeter, we can immediately know the music is coming out of that tweeter... not the whole speaker. And the very best speakers, music seems to be coming out of a box.
Music does not come out of a box.
Normal round tweeters are more like a spotlight. The Heil Tweeter is more like a floodlight. Since the Heil tweeter radiates the high frequencies over 20 times the area, by the time the sound reaches your listening position, it has filled the room.
The music does not seem to becoming out of a box.
The band, the symphony or the movie seem to be in your living room. Alive!
The one inch tweeter is made small to be lightweight and spread the sound out. Tweeters are made out of lightweight materials: aluminum, titanium, cloth etc so they can move back and forth quickly.
A drummer strikes a cymbal. The cymbal vibrates back and forth, ten, twenty, even thirty thousand times per second. The tweeter must do the same.
A tweeter has a lightweight cone, and attached to the is a voice coil, which is a length of wire wrapped around something called the former. The voice coil is inside the magnet.
The very best, lightest tweeter still are 100 times heavier, which means they have 100 times more mass or more inertia the ultra thin plastic diaphragm of the Heil tweeter.
This means the Heil tweeter moves much faster and far more accurately to create more realistic musical sounds. Actually, because of the Physics and the way the air is pushed, the Heil tweeters pushes the air five times faster.
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