How I Transformed My Home Listening Experience

You are 250% right with everything you said! What you stated is exactly what I am hearing, the soundstage and ambience is off the charts, these tweeters are simply elevating the entire presentation, without drawing attention to themselves, which I was initially worried about. Thanks for your thoughts, you described exactly what one can expect out of these add on super tweeters.

 

No, the operation is very straight forward, no getting into the cabinet, no transformers to deal with causing impedance problems, and a vast array of frequency settings and loudness attenuation possibilities to make your blend seamless with most any two, or three way, or in my case, 4-way speaker design.

Polk Audio LSiM707 Loudspeaker – Reviews | TONEAudio MAGAZINE

 

The speaker cables I use with my Wharfedale's are terminated by spades on the speaker end. I see from the pictures on the website that these s-tweeters are also using the spades to hook onto speaker posts. Can I use banana plugs instead? - My banana terminals are free and idle.

 

My hearing starts to diminish at about 12.5 kHz, and by 14 kHz I can hear exactly "bupkis". It will be curious to see how these things make it better.

 

I used super tweeters many years ago with the original Quad ESL, set up as a mini-HQD system. Originally, I used the Decca, which was what Levinson used; I still have 'em, more for artifact value - they need to be repaired. I also used the Sequerra ribbon tweeter, and Dick was helpful to me in providing replacement ribbons, how-to, etc. (It was cool to talk to one of the legends of hi-fi).
With the Quad, it added more dispersion of high frequencies across a greater horizontal spread; the original Quad is notorious for being "beamy" and having a very narrow sweet spot. I also used a couple of early powered subwoofers in this set-up and was never happy with how they cohered; I did fool around with electronic crossovers at one point (remember the old Audio Research active cross-overs? Don't see those much any more).

I had the Quads restored a couple years ago and use them as G-d and Peter Walker intended; unadorned, no longer on Arcici stands but their own, little stubby space-age retro legs and quit trying to make them better or different than what they are: a marvelous aperture to the sound in the midrange, with tight bass as far as it goes, and a very narrow sweet spot (such is life).
Super tweeters were quite common back in the day, Janzen had tweeters, there were piezo devices for the big-assed Bozak, the various ribbons, and of course, the plasma. (Dukane Ionovac anyone?)
Fun stuff. I would imagine your success in integrating them depends as much on the main speaker as it does the add-on tweeter. They did give a greater sense of 'air' with the Quad, but truth be told, that old classic is just so coherent that adding anything more than a second set, to run stacked Quads, is going to be tricky.
FWIW, I also did early stuff with rear channel before any discrete multichannel was available, using a delay line and a processor with an add-on set of cheap bookshelf speakers. A dear friend, who forgot more about hi-fi than I ever knew, came into the room, saw what I was doing, and said "turn that stuff off," referring to the rear channel thing. After a few minutes, he said "turn it on" and we left it on for a while. (This was many years ago, he passed in 1991). On some material, it was downright spooky even though it wasn't much more than a Hafler out of phase trick with a little delay and no special source material other than standard stereo LPs.
Have fun. That's what the equipment part of this should be about.

 

You absolutely can! On mine, my Polks were bi-wired and connected with banana plugs, so I used all the spaces so to speak, but I just wound the wires together on the top plugs and tightened down, done deal!

 

Quite correct. I have JBL 2404 "Baby Cheek's" super-tweeter's on top of my Altec horn's.

This is something that most people would never think of doing, as most people's impression of horn's is that they are overly bright in the first place, even though the Altec's are not.



They start rolling in at 6-kHz and go all the way up.



The custom crossover on the top runs the JBL 2404's. The bottom crossover is from ALK Engineering and sends everything from 500-Hz. up to the horns.



A well designed and implemented super-tweeter can add so much nice sparkle to the high end without any harshness.

This is a rear view of the A7's with the JBL's before I installed the ALK crossover's.



Litejazz53, excellent photos (as usual!). These Aperion super-tweeter's look remarkably well finished. One would never think that they were only $300/pr!

Having the 707's like Litejazz53, the tweeter's in them are ring radiator's, which I like because they are not at all harsh like many modern tower speaker's have a tendency of being.

Here you can add the right amount of sparkle to fit your music selection and your mood.

Excellent review!

 

Your hearing is about the same as mine. As we age, men lose there ability to hear HF's at roughly twice the rate as women do.

It is on a curve, with the highest frequencies falling of quickly. Most men can no longer hear to 20-kHz. after the get in to their twenties.

When age related hearing loss kicks in, a man may be down 40-dB. at a certain age, where a woman might only be down 20-dB. at the same age.



There is a lot of information between 8-kHz. and 14-kHz. The super-tweeter will prop it up for you on your Wharfedale's.

Your Zu's are basically a 10" full range driver, whose frequency falls off naturally above 10-kHz.

The tweeter on the Zu's has a cap that prevents frequencies lower than about 10-kHz. from getting through to the driver. It takes care of things from 10-kHz. the rest of the way up.

A super-tweeter on your Wharfedale's, will give you top end sparkle, similar to what you have with your Zu's.

 

pun intended?

 

I get it, in adding more space and air to the recording, they work just as a subwoofer.

Problem is I have magnetostatic speakers that don't allow (just like Maggies) to put anything on top of them.

B&O must have had the coolest design ever :

BeoVox 2500 "Cube" Tweeters

 

LOL, you've just alerted me to it. No, it wasn't, but now it is...

 

Very interesting! I was reading up about super-tweets two years back, hoping to add some to my set-up but then found a pair of speakers I love. They're Spendor BC1s, which already contain super-tweeters. Next time I am in the market I will probably just jump on a pair of these - thanks for the heads-up as I also did not want to spend four figures.
DD

 

I can't imagine that my hearing is any better, as I'm old and worn out, BUT, the improvement is real, audible and very nice.

 

I should have posted this picture, better late than never. So many after market tweeters do not offer all of these options.

 

did you try to measure produced effect with say REW to get the idea what's going on with FR there and mimic it with EQ?

 

I have not run any room equalization tests with and without the tweeters, it would be interesting, and something I probably will do, once I understand exactly how the program works, thanks for mentioning. That is a really cool idea!

 

Do you have photo of how they are wired? I have my 707's bi-wired and am curious as to how I would set these up.

 

You would just take the tweeter/HF portion of your bi-wiring and run cables parallel to those to the super-tweeter.

 

The photos alone make this thread worth it.

 

Sorry if you already said this but yesterday I couldn't find it. Where did you buy them because I did a quick ebay search and they did not appear.

 

On amazon

 

Now that I am getting more familiar with the additions the tweeters make, I have made their presence more subtle, again, the goal is to perfectly blend with existing speakers, and I think I am totally there now. I was asked about the slight angle on the Polk LSiM 707 speakers. If you will notice the angle is very slight, and the tweeters are directed downward, much like a Wilson Audio tweeter. They are pointed perfectly in the seated listener position. The angle is not so steep where the tweeters are off balance, a perfect fit for the 707 and 703 models, just a great addition!

 

please buy umik-1 and get response graphs with and without those super tweeters to get the idea what's going on there
btw do you think these little ones will slide off lsim 705?

 

I also have pretty bad high frequency hearing loss. I'm not getting what y'all are saying. The same treble boost can be achieved with eq if your speakers have reasonable frequency response. In prior discussions, we had kinda concluded that super tweeters were the ticket if one wanted so much treble boost that it would possibly endanger the speakers' tweeters.

 

No, all of the LSiM line is shaped roughly the same on the top.

I have an A/B amp/speaker switch box on top of one of mine. There are three pairs of speaker cables that keep rear tension.

If you wanted, since the wires would run down the rear, you could tape them in place on the back of your 705's.