# Let's talk speaker cones...



## 300Z (Mar 20, 2005)

Did some search around and haven't really seen any significant posts on the subject so...

What is the correlation between cone profiles and materials to the actual sound that we hear? What difference exactly does a cone profile make assuming the same material is used? Straight, curvilinear? Soft, hard cones?

Leo


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## Xander (Mar 20, 2007)

I'd say the cone material/shape does affect the sound, strength, rigidity and weatherproofness are probably big reasons for choosing cone material.

The stereotypes I hear are that paper cones are natural, although I read recently that they actually color the sound significantly.

The other stereotype is that aluminum is very crisp but can have bad breakup nodes up high.

Let's see...polycones...smooth sounding?

All I can say is I have carbon fiber mids and I love them. I have to experiment with crossover points more to see how high I can push them and still have them sound good. At least my tweet can go plenty low, so it's just a matter of what sounds best with different points and slopes I guess.


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## tcguy85 (Oct 29, 2007)

well infinity has spent a lot of time with their cones for their home audio line up. they have thier CMMD cones. ceramic metal matrix diaphragm. pretty much thin metal with a ceramic coating. i wonder what they discovered and why they went that route. i know they sound good though. they are a little light so i think thats why their mid-bass suffers slightly.


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## Xander (Mar 20, 2007)

tcguy85 said:


> well infinity has spent a lot of time with their cones for their home audio line up. they have thier CMMD cones. ceramic metal matrix diaphragm. pretty much thin metal with a ceramic coating. i wonder what they discovered and why they went that route. i know they sound good though. they are a little light so i think thats why their mid-bass suffers slightly.


I believe one of the main driving factors of the design was to get the resonant frequency of the cone material above the audible frequency range.


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## solacedagony (May 18, 2006)

zaphaudio.com, in the L18 project, has a link to a paper entitled "Geometrical Stiffness of Loudspeaker Cones".
http://www.loudsoft.com/\loudsoft\my files\ALMA Paper 2003.pdf


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## MadMaxSE-L (Oct 19, 2006)

solacedagony said:


> zaphaudio.com, in the L18 project, has a link to a paper entitled "Geometrical Stiffness of Loudspeaker Cones".
> http://www.loudsoft.com/\loudsoft\my files\ALMA Paper 2003.pdf


Man, I saw the OP last night while at work and searched for an hour trying to find this link. I knew I had seen it before, but I couldn't remember where


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