Anybody use tweeters?

Glenn Demichele · Post by **Glenn Demichele** » 14 Sep 2015 8:55 pm

Does anybody use a two-way (woofer & tweeter (horn or dome)) or 3 way speaker cabinet? I'd be interested in hearing opinions, and y'all have lots of (good) opinions.
Thanks, Glenn

Craig Baker · Post by **Craig Baker** » 14 Sep 2015 9:16 pm

Glenn,
Back in the 80s, I used a modified Fender Super Reverb.
Rather than 4 ten inch speakers, it had 2 tens in the bottom, with the compartment sealed off, and the reverb tank on top of the speaker compartment. It had a bass port and a JBL Ring Radiator for a tweeter. You could play a CD through the amp and it equaled any HI-FI equipment, but for steel, you really had to throttle back the ring radiator or it was very shrill. Fortunately, it came with a variable control and overall, it was a great sounding amp when properly adjusted.

Regards,
Craig

mtulbert · Post by **mtulbert** » 15 Sep 2015 3:04 am

Hi Glenn,

My rig is a Sarno Revelation which I run through a QSC K-10 Powered speaker. Sounds amazing to me. The highs are stunning and are not shrill.

Erv Niehaus · Post by **Erv Niehaus** » 15 Sep 2015 7:11 am

I have a pair of Peavey cabinets with 15" Black Widows. I installed tweeters in the cabinets along with the Black Widows but the jury is still out if there was any improvement.

Glenn Demichele · Post by **Glenn Demichele** » 15 Sep 2015 7:27 am

mtulbert wrote:Hi Glenn,

My rig is a Sarno Revelation which I run through a QSC K-10 Powered speaker. Sounds amazing to me. The highs are stunning and are not shrill.

Mark: Wow, 1000W. Do you use any eq? Glenn

mtulbert · Post by **mtulbert** » 15 Sep 2015 12:08 pm

Glenn.

I do not use any eq at all. Just some reverb. And although the thing is rated at a 1000 watts, I never even get close to that. We run everything through our PA and this is really just for my monitor reference. Every once in a while we will do a small venue and use the back line to fill the room. It does the job with no problems at all.

Mark

Brad Sarno · Post by **Brad Sarno** » 15 Sep 2015 12:46 pm

mtulbert wrote:Glenn.

I do not use any eq at all....

Mark

Just to clarify, the Revelation has EQ in it as it's a preamp.

B

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 15 Sep 2015 1:24 pm

Years ago Bill Lawrence advocated for & urged me to try a Radio Shack tweeter that could be added on without need for a crossover. He was very enthusiastic about the idea of a tweeter in a guitar rig.
I tried it and I hated it.
High fidelity just isn't what I am looking for in a steel or guitar rig. The inherent roll-off of guitar speakers is what I am used to and what I like.

I've had occasion to use a back line keyboard amp with steel and again, that tweeter or horn was the last thing I wanted to hear my steel through.

The Radio Shack thing was cheap and...Radio Shack...so if one thinks that this was not a good test of the tweeter idea, fair enough.

YMMV of course.

mtulbert · Post by **mtulbert** » 15 Sep 2015 1:33 pm

Brad,

I was thinking of an external EQ. Of course I use the controls in the Revelation.

Jack Stanton · Post by **Jack Stanton** » 15 Sep 2015 2:00 pm

Craig Baker,
I believe that was the amp you were using the night I came in and saw you with Tom Donahue at the old Coach Dog Tavern in Bensalem PA. You were playing an old Fender 400 and you had just came out with the Lil" Izzy.
Your sound could, to quote Buddy Emmons " blister a beagles ear at 50 paces". Unfortunately, I was sitting only 20 away!

Glenn Demichele · Post by **Glenn Demichele** » 15 Sep 2015 4:45 pm

Brad Sarno wrote:
mtulbert wrote:Glenn.

I do not use any eq at all....

Mark

Just to clarify, the Revelation has EQ in it as it's a preamp.

B

Hi Brad : BTW, I'm TC's buddy and heard your talk and played bass at the Midwest Steel Guitar Convention 2 years ago. Sorry Brad and Mark, I was thinking Black Box, not Revelation - plenty of EQ in that.
Where I got started on this tweeter thing is that I always aimed for a "Hi Fi" sound out of my bass rigs. I recently made a small cab with a 10" and dome tweeter for a fretless bass jazz trio gig I do on Saturdays, and it really sounds clear and defined. I love my steel sound over headphones and this little cab sounds HiFi for steel in my living room. However: I don't know how it will translate on the bandstand - I will find out this weekend. My new "full range" sound will either be great, or trespass into everyone else's spectrum and jumble up the band sound. I'm going to bring my Telonics cab as back up just in case and make a temporary A/B speaker switch.

Craig Baker · Post by **Craig Baker** » 15 Sep 2015 4:51 pm

Jack,
It serves you right for going in a place like that.

Indeed that was my Fender 800. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to stop sounding like a Fender. I was threatened by PETA several times.

Craig

Georg Sørtun · Post by **Georg Sørtun** » 16 Sep 2015 2:57 am

My old HiFi rig has been stowed away for about 15 years, not for not sounding right but because it's too big and heavy. It has extended bass-range (based on a horn-loaded long-throw 7" KEF speaker and double wide-tuned bass lines) and a horn-loaded tweeter, and compares well with studio reference speakers except that it can deliver loud enough volume for use on quite large stages and outdoor venues. Was my only guitar/bass/steel combo for over a decade, and it never let me down. It was just too big and heavy.

Problem I had when designing/building it to HiFi specs - back in -88, was that available dome-tweeters could not handle high enough spikes without burning out, and that the alternative - piezo-electric tweeters - distort and scream terrible in the 2 to 6KHz range when run without some form for cross-over filter ... mine were the best piezo-electric tweeters money could buy at the time, but they still behaved much as cheap "Radio Shack" tweeters when set up as they usually are for stage and PA use.

The solution was to set up a chain of four well-tuned high-pass filters for the tweeter, and phase it in (position it) very exactly with the main speaker in the cabinet so it took over as the main speaker fell off - no actual cross-over filter needed. The "equalizer" was BCD switches to tune the high-pass filters in steps so I could offset them from the very flat overall frequency response as the venue/situation/instrument required.

I liked the flat and truly HiFi audio reproduction this powered full-range speaker gave me, over dedicated combos or running through PA systems. I did not like the size and weight of it though - not the tweeter's fault, so by now this "black box" has been sitting silently on a shelf in the tractor garage on our farm for over a decade.

Brad Sarno · Post by **Brad Sarno** » 16 Sep 2015 4:37 am

Glenn,

in general, guitarists and steel players work pretty hard to avoid the tweetery highs in their tone, very intentionally avoiding those high frequencies. For years Paul Franklin used the older Mesa Studio Preamp's recording output. That output has a very steep low-pass filter that virtually dumps all highs above 5kHz. He even used that output to drive his Mosvalve amp and Black Widow speakers. That was a very famous and often recorded tone that had virtually NO high frequency, "tweeter" energy, completely absent. That shows us just how much of the steel's core voice really lives in the midrange and mid-treble.

But, like Mark Tulbert said, there are some vacuum tube circuits that have a smooth and sweet enough treble that it actually sounds pretty cool thru tweeters, thru a full-range delivery. I think it's tubes that make that possible because of this inherent smoothness and sweetness they have. Otherwise those highs may likely be just way too "glassy", too much of the high frequency energy we generally try to avoid.

Brad

Mike Neer · Post by **Mike Neer** » 16 Sep 2015 5:18 am

I have these old passive 2-way EV cabinets that are built like a tank. At first, I tried it out with a Carvin amp and a number of different preamps, but did not like the horn. To top things off, it was noisy (a lot of added hiss). I removed the horn, replaced the 12" speaker with an old Altec and went to heaven.

Philip Mitrakos · Post by **Philip Mitrakos** » 16 Sep 2015 6:09 pm

WHAT ? !

Glenn Demichele · Post by **Glenn Demichele** » 16 Sep 2015 8:41 pm

James Quackenbush · Post by **James Quackenbush** » 23 Sep 2015 12:14 pm

When using today's modeling preamp's , full range speakers with tweetrs are the norm ... Any speaker cabs other than cabs used for modeling amps just don't sound right to me ...The tone is pushed too much on the high end sounds thin and brittle to me ....

Richard Sinkler · Post by **Richard Sinkler** » 23 Sep 2015 4:27 pm

In the 70's, I used to build custom JBL cabinets, both instrument and stero speakers. I made myself a cabinet with a K130. I decided to add two piezo electric tweeters. The tweeters lasted one gig before I disconnected them. The sound really sucked, and that was with a Twin Reverb.

Glenn Demichele · Post by **Glenn Demichele** » 23 Sep 2015 4:49 pm

Great thread. I built a "hi fi" cab - a small closed back containing a 10" and a tweeter. It sounds great on my fretless bass jazz trio gig, which is why I built it. I played two steel gigs this weekend and took my telonics 15 in an open back, and the hi-fi cabinet, and I made a little temporary a/b speaker switch. The first gig was in a big club in Wrigleyville. The hifi cab got completely lost in the mix and I needed the focus of the telonics to even hear myself clearly. The hifi cab is way less efficient too, like 1/3rd the volume of the telonics with the same amp setting. The second gig was in a much smaller bar, and I flipped back and forth, getting a good but different sound out of each. Our bass player (also a steel player) listened while another bass player sat in. He said the hifi cab sounded more Bakersfield. In the end though we both preferred the telonics, and surprisingly the telonics seemed to put more high end into the room than the cab with the tweeter.

Georg Sørtun · Post by **Georg Sørtun** » 23 Sep 2015 5:54 pm

Piezo tweeters must be filtered, as otherwise they go/sound "quack" and also won't last long...

1: although piezo tweeters don't actually produce audible lows, unfiltered they will be fed the voltage for the entire frequency range which will heat up and damage the piezo element.

2: piezo tweeters are anything but linear along their range - they peak near their lower frequency range, so they must be linearized.

3: the tweeter should take over seamlessly where/as the main speaker falls off, which means the tweeter must be both phase- and level-balanced in the cross-over frequency range for the full-range set-up to sound balanced.

When I built my last powered speaker-cab with tweeter - back in the -80s, it took me a couple of days to get the 3 points above pretty OK with a filter arrangement like the above, with each step - RC2, RC3 and RC4 - filtering in more signal at increasingly higher frequencies.
All I remember now is that the "R1" (attenuated full-range) resistor was about 50ohm/2Watt, and that the powered speaker measured, and sounded, good and pretty linear from about 30Hz to 18KHz. I used the construction for guitar, bass, steel and in an allround PA system for maybe a couple of decades, and was happy with its sound.

George Kimery · Post by **George Kimery** » 24 Sep 2015 3:18 am

Recently, my BW 1501 speaker crashed and burned. I replaced it with a Telonics cabinet, which I love. In the interim, I was forced to use a Kustom wedge floor monitor on two gigs. I couldn't believe it, but it did sound pretty darn good. The problem was, I couldn't get enough volume out of it for some reason. My setup was guitar > Black Box > 120 Pedal > Carvim BX 500 amp with a Wet Reverb in the effects loop.

Richard Sinkler · Post by **Richard Sinkler** » 24 Sep 2015 11:43 am

The tweeters I used had some sort of electronics with them. I'm not sure if it was what Georg mentioned. I assume not, because these tweeters sounded like crap.

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 24 Sep 2015 2:35 pm

I can't hear much above 10k. $:\$

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 24 Sep 2015 2:52 pm

In my post above, I had meant to describe the tweeters that I tried per Bill Lawrence's recommendation as piezos. But really cheap piezos. Gaa, I hated them.

Like b0b, my hearing renders higher frequencies as mere rumors. Five years ago an audiologist said as much and I recently tried one of these internet hearing tests that probably tells me less than nothing, frequency response control being highly suspect, but it was pretty depressing.

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Anybody use tweeters?

Anybody use tweeters?

Anybody using tweeters?