single driver alnico speakers - concerns

[nandac]

would appreciate the views of forum members on these two issues :

1. there is a view that allnico speakers get demagnetized and so performance degrades over a period of time (and it has to be magnetized again).

2. there is a view that because a single driver speaker lacks a tweeter, the highs are "rolled off" - and so it is at a disadvantage in comparison to a two way design.

any truth to the above two claims?

 

[ranjeetrain]

No 2 is certainly true.

Usually people are not as much concerned about highs than lows though. As most common people have trouble hearing above 14 KHz. So any speaker that produces flat response till 12 Khz serves the purpose acceptably enough, especially for the kind of music target audiophiles listen to and the aspect of music they emphasize upon.

The key to understanding here is - what kind of a listener one is (and this is not being said in a negative way). It's perfectly normal that different people would like different aspects of sound reproduction exactly the same way as different people would like to hear different artists/bands/genres. For these audiophiles frequency extremes is not as important as the tone, timber, voicing, cohesion etc is.

While designing a loudspeaker around a single driver, the cabinet becomes all the more important, as the cabinet serves as a natural frequency limiter/enhancer. Some single driver loudspeaker designers use another driver to enhance the last octave; sometimes they use horns, sometimes transmission line loading and so on.