Quote:
Originally Posted by Mouse
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.
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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.