AE Speakers Cones – A Comment from the Manufactuerer

The Open Baffle speakers I am building are using the Acoustic Elegance drivers from USA. There are a number of reasons for using these, primarily they have the lowest motor distortion of any bass driver out there and they make a specific driver for open baffle use. What I was not sure of was if they had the cone necessary for this project. So all though they have incredibly small motor distortion due to their Lambda drive that allows them to run to 4 kHz that means little if there is significant cone breakup. Cone breakup is caused by standing waves being existed in the cone due to the music but the cone having insufficient well dampened properties to kill them. This is fairly typical of any paper cone no matter how well they are made with all sorts of ides to help dampen them. This is one reason that the likes of Focal and AudioTechnology have instead used sandwich cones. These are similar to ply in that they have a tough skin material and then a foam material sandwiched between them. The foam then is doing the dampening.

It was due to this unknown cone quality of the AE Speakers that lead this project to use the SEAS Excel magnesium alloy cone drivers similar to what I used in the Haffner speakers. These SEAS Excel have proven themselves to have the best sound I have heard of any midrange conventional driver. Whilst the Haffner is using the smaller 5 and a quarter-inch driver, the open baffle demands a larger driver due to baffle board roll off (loss in the bass response due to their being no box.

The unknown question was, how far down with the 8″ Excel go and how far up with the AE Speaker 15″ come up, even if the manufacturer claims 4 kHz, this project is all about proving that claim.

Recently, John from AE Speakers published this below response to this very question in FB. His response is very interesting and if it proves to be accurate then the use of the SEAS Excel 8″ driver may become redundant as the Hawthorne Audio AMT-700 is already coming down to 700 Hz very successful during my initial experiments. If then the AE can work up to it, this project becomes a two-way rather than 3 way. We shall see how the final speakers sound after I receive the  AE Speakers some time soon I expect.

A Response from John Janowitz, the Owner of AE Speakers.