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As soon as someone figures out how to make an all Plasma speaker

then you will hear likely the first and only coloration free speaker. As such the closest anyone has gotten so far was the Hill Plasmatronic, which took the flame tweeter all the way down to 750Hz. It was a very complicated system and used He to make the plasma.

If you have never heard highs from a plasma tweeter then you need to do that to hear what coloration free highs sound like.

ALL materials add their own colorations to the sound, ALL. The best speakers I have heard either use the same material for all drivers and use materials that don't suffer from severe breakup outside their optimal operating band. Very stiff materials like ceramic and aluminium are not well damped and when the breakup very large modes appear that are impossible to completely suppress. It gives a brittle sound with ceramic drivers and a metallic tinge with metal drivers. This can be minimizd of course with steep crossovers; however, they introduce a problem as well, discontinuity between drivers, which is most a problem when using drivers of DIFFERENT materials.

The worst offender I have heard in this regard was the B&W N802. It had carbon fiber woofers, kevlar mid, and aluminum tweeter. Everything was strapped together with very high order crossovers (6th order even I think). The resulting sound is quite bad and the music is clearly separated into horizontal bands where each drivers input is clearly audible. Each drivers coloration stands out in stark relief utterly destroying the illusion of music.

Now I had a pair of Infinity IRS Betas, which had third order xovers but sounded quite coherent because from 170 Hz and up the drivers were all the same EMIT type construction so the coloration was consistent.

I have come to realize that the least colored SOUNDING speakers are those which either have a consistent coloration from top to bottom like a full-range electrostatic or ribbon speaker or use drivers without severe breakup issues that need "correcting" so that shallow (1st or 2nd order) slopes can be used for smooth blending rather than abrupt transitions.

So until they can come up with a material that doesn't sound like a material, ie. plasma, the best is to have gentle transitions between drivers and the same material doing the whole frequency range but not one with breakup issues as these can be suppressed but not eliminated.


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