5”s wtf why not 8s 0r 10s ?
No doubt, I would be first in line to purchase an 8"/10" Anarchy! Especially if they scaled it up, accordingly.
Very nice writup and thanks for taking the time to do that. Thanks to beak81champ for donating them for your subjective testing. I do not want to hyjack your thread, but would value your opinion in general about aluminum cone drivers. I think it’s generally related in topic but please say otherwise.
So I’m wondering about aluminum cone drivers in general. As soon as I read that these were aluminum cone drivers, I took pause at any thought about buying them. Aluminum cone drivers seem to suffer from some harshness below their cone breakup nodes, even with a 24 db LR crossover. Now my experience is just with the Dayton ND series drivers so they are nothing special, but I cannot help noticing the listening fatigue over long listening periods that I experience with my Dayton’s over my Focal fiberglass cone or SB Acoustics Egyptian pulp paper cone drivers. My Dayton Audio ND140-4 5-1/4” drivers are LP at 2400 hz 24 DB LR and HP at 70 Hz LR for reference. Do you find that some or most aluminum cone drivers suffer from 2nd and 3rd order distortion that effects how they sound in the ranges I’m describing in general? Do you prefer a particular cone material or category over another and why?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, it was my pleasure. I almost forgot to come back to the thread, beak sent me a kind reminder to share my impressions. And I should be the last person concerned with a thread being hijacked with some of my recent remarks in other threads, lol.
Yes, I would concur with your assessment of aluminum cones. Always trust your ears. It's a great question you raise and you would be right in hesitating to buy most aluminum drivers for a 2way if you are not prepared to build an appropriate notch filter. No doubt 99% of aluminum drivers suffer from very nasty odd-order distortion (mostly 3rd & 5th) correlating with the high magnitude break-up resonance, and that can easily be appreciated down in the passband even with LR4 filters. The 2nd order stuff is not nearly as offensive, even about the 1%-2% mark, but you don't want too much of it. It would point to another obvious issue with the driver and these things can always be seen in the impedance plot if there is any question. The only way to really be successful would be to build a series resonance trap in parallel with the driver (yes, a passive LCR filter with your active setup). One which targets the frequency, Q, and amplitude of the break-up, but you would also need to build a zobel ahead of that for it to be effective (CR in parallel with the driver to keep impedance flat in the circuit. This means no less than 5 passive components, even for an active setup, and not many folks are prepared to do that. I don't blame them, as it sorta defeats the purpose if that purpose is simplicity or convenience. There's no denying the benefits of an aluminum cone, though. The pistonic behavior in the traditional aluminum cone offers incredible bass solidity and a very detailed midrange. Couple that with a low distortion motor and quality soft parts (actually soft!) and you could end up with quite nice results. It just requires a careful, though-out approach.
Enter the new SB Acoustics aluminum drivers and the traditional problems have seemingly disappeared. Where most traditional aluminum cones have a relatively thick and straight profile to avoid any type of flex at all, along with a 90* lip on the underside of the cone for further strength and rigidity, SBA have gone with a much thinner, curvilinear profile and omitted the 90* lip on the underside, while adding the ribs near the perimeter of the cone similar to the ScanSpeak Revalator to address the energy modes within the cone. Of course the size and shape of the dust cap are also vital to how the rest of the cones behaves, so this is worth noting. But all of this works together to force the resonance much, much higher and reduces the magnitude a bit by dissipating the energy in a more effective manner. Indeed, 3rd & 5th order distortion is vanishingly low for this type of driver and materials. This also leads to a much better spectral decay performance because the cone gets quiet much sooner after the signal is removed (or in between waveforms during complex music!), which to your ears just sounds much cleaner and more open or transparent.
So a less violent break-up happening at a much higher frequency changes the game quite a bit for the aluminum cone being used in a 2way. Even running the SBA aluminum raw it sounds just amazing. The aluminum edge (the character) is certainly there but it is at a frequency (10kHz!) where we normally might like to boost a dB or two, so it's sorta fun. Make no mistake, though, it is distortion and so it still needs to be filtered out but you do not need the resonance trap or zobel if you are going with the normal active approach. Now couple that cone performance with the absolutely fabulous motors and soft parts found in the SBA drivers and you have something wonderful. Detail, yes. But most any driver can serve up detail. These drivers just release information that has always been there but has been masked out by the noise or distortion associate with traditional aluminum approaches. The ceramics are even better because they utilize the aluminum cones and deposit the ceramic onto that, effectively increasing rigidity but also further damping resonance. The subtle complexities that these aluminum and aluminum/ceramic SBA drivers can dish out is mind blowing at their price point.
So where does that leave us with the Anarchy 5", since that's what brought us here? It actually brings me to a correction because I recently noticed the cone has a slight curve to it and thus is not a straight profile as I'd indicated. Sorry for that. But the cone thickness is in between the thick of a Seas cone and the thin of the SBA, or even thinner Jordan, EAD, or MarkAudio cones. It also does not have a 90* lip and so will flex to a degree which explains when the break-up is not nearly as offensive as we're accustomed to. I believe it also has a coating on the cone (which would offer some damping) but I cannot confirm that from any available reading material. I believe I already touched on the strong points of the Anarchy motor and the compliance of the suspension relative to the SBA.
To summarize, if you seek an incredibly strong amount of bass with a very well behaved midrange from a single 5" driver, the Anarchy is a great way to go. You will simply get more bass from that driver and you will not need to be overly cautious about dumping power into it from a reasonable abuse perspective. Reasonable being the key word, there. If you seek a class leading distortion profile with an amazingly open and free midrange with unbelievable bandwidth (in both aspects, FR and amplitude dynamics), you should really consider auditioning the SBA drivers. Do not plan on abusing them, though. While they have gobs of mechanical excursion capabilities (nearly a full inch!), the soft parts are incredibly soft and easily driven to full excursion with low power (thus the incredible level of resolution even down to a whisper level), and the coil itself is only 2 layers and not terribly tall. This is the tradeoff for frequency response out to 20kHz with a 5" & 6" driver but that's not to say that they are not tough. You just need to be aware of it and apply power, filters and EQ, accordingly. An enclosure would absolutely be ideal, in most cases. All depends on what you want from your music/system and your level of commitment to the vehicle/install, but again, I feel that is overstating the obvious.
As far as other cones, I do like composites. Glass fiber and carbon fiber, mostly. They have a different type of character and when done right they offer a dry sort of crunch that makes for a nice midrange able to convey wood instruments and things llike that very nicely. Bad versions will sound very artificial, though, just like the bad aluminum cones they will need very special attention in the form of the same LCR and zobel circuits.
None of the above describes how the cones sound when the driver is on total distress, you know, like when the suspension is being pulled tight and the cone actually sounds like you tapped on it. Not sure if I'm articulating that very well, just wanted to attempt to differentiate between character that is always there because it is inherent to the cone material and character that is the result of what I call "cone cry".
Hope I touched on everything for you.
