Tweeter material and their effect on fatigue.
 

I'm suspicious aluminum tweeters are giving me hearing fatigue. I look it up online and see this is a thing. Some people say metal tweeters cause hearing fatigue (with exceptions) and textile tweeters are easier for longer periods.

So I never make another mistake like buying aluminum speakers, please share your experience with tweeter and woofer materials and their effect on sound and your fatigue if you experience it.

Yes, that can happen but there are some external factors at play. A lot has to do with the genres of music and the mastering, loudness and dynamic range compression. The ears are more sensitive to distortion, clipping and unnatural types of sound reproduction than we think they are.

Listening fatigue is not so much the level or loudness of music but the brain getting tired of processing what the ears hear which is not natural. Try listening to a simple acoustic guitar and you can do it for hours on end, even at loud levels, try listening to a dynamic range compressed complex music and you'll want to turn off your stereo in minutes.

Some of it has to do with the "pre and post ringing" of some D to A conversion which does not occur in nature, some of it has to do with the odd vs even order harmonics and tubes vs solid state clipping differently if driven hard, soft clipping vs hard clipping, etc... The room acoustics and overly live rooms with lots of reverb and especially untreated early reflections that confuse the brain. It's a bit much to get into in one post...

Some compensate with less revealing speakers as silk and soft types of tweeter domes tend to sound a bit more forgiving which helps somewhat but unless the speaker is truly rolled off by design, it doesn't help all that much.

I've heard plenty of soft dome tweeter speakers that still sounded fatiguing and I've heard metal dome tweeter speakers that sounded great, depends on many factors, some of which I listed above.

This is why the Dynaudio Estoar silk dome tweeters are so famous: they are incredible detailed, but natural-sounding and never fatiguiing. It can be a tough trick to pull off with all of "competing factors" as Serge has pointed out.

Besides the material it is made of, the linearity of the tweeter is also very important. How well the tweeter behaves and how accurate it is, goes a long way to reproducing the sound cleanly without ringing and other artifacts our ears pick up on. Non linearity of the tweeter is much more fatiguing to our brains than the tonal qualities of the midrange or the woofer driver. Where the follies of the midrange or woofer are those we interpret as the nasal or sibilance qualities, bloated or tight bass, the tweeter results in the harshness of the sound much of the time.

Lightness, rigidity and damping are the 3 main factors in a tweeter design. Since the tweeter has to reproduce frequencies in the higher range of the audible bandwidth, it moves at speeds much greater than the rest of the drivers. Obviously for all the micro details to be preserved accurately, the tweeter made of a light, rigid and well damped material is key. Obviously metal dome tweeters, especially the Beryllium which is seven times more rigid than titanium or aluminum and has sound wave propagation three times faster than Titanium and two and a half times faster than Aluminum has an advantage for the acoustical linearity and transparency of the upper end frequencies.

All of which is great unless the music is crappy... Then you hear all that compression and distortion with all the ultra detail of that crap preserved. :D

Before you go switching speakers and other gear, this little box for $149 can help you gain the upper hand with the crappy recordings.

http://www.schiit.com/products/loki

I can listen to My Sonus Fabers practically forever. Whether movies or music I never felt the need to turn it off, even after a long Game of Thrones or Stranger Things marathon.

My living room has 5 in ceiling Jamo speakers. I thought they were aluminum but after looking them up they're probably titanium. These speakers are 18 years old that came with the housem the new Jamo in a similar package comes with titanium. I watch a lot of cable news in this setting. After a half hour I'd rather turn it off whether it's music or TV.

I have Paradigm CT2 Millenia speakers connected to my PC with aluminum dome and an aluminum cone. Lately I don't want to listen past 5 minutes. They sound great, crystal clear, awesome bass for something so compact. These sound so much better than the Bose companion 5 speakers they replaced, I just don't last long.

I had Bose Companion 5, I don't know what they're made of. I can go an hour easy, but after that and I prefer silence. The vocals are so muddy and I think my brain would get confused trying to process the sound like PHC1 mentions.

My sonus Faber really spoiled me. After I got spoiled listening to these all the time. It literally pains me to hear anything else. I'm still trying to figure things out though.

Yes, Esotar in the Dynaudio is a very good tweeter. :yes:

I didn't realize you were talking about the lower end speakers with metal domes. I tend to stay away from those all together. Nothing worse than a cheap metal dome tweeter. :no: Soft/silk dome is the way to go with the lower end speakers for sure.

Paradigm Ct2 millennia are $900 for the kit. I don't know if that's the lower end in Audio Aficionado for computer speakers, but there is a major price disparity between my home theater SF setup and the Jamos or my desktop Paradigms.