Getting better performance from your loudspeaker’s tweeter

This tip from Craig Burns, a happy PS Audio customer and Power Plant owner, works on most every loudspeakers. We would add that there are certainly varying opinions of the subject by the manufacturers themselves. Most loudspeakers do seem, however, to benfit from this upgrade. A nice feature to this tip is the ease of which you can try it and remove it if it doesn't work for your system.

Here is Craig's tip:

There are a lot of speaker manufactures that put a fuzzy cloth material around the tweeters of their speakers. It's in a donut fashion around the tweeter to improve imaging. Why other manufactures do not utilize this I'm not sure? I think this helps with diffraction of the tweeter on the face of your speaker cabinet itself. I have found that if you go to any arts and craft store you can buy for about $5, sheets of felt with a sticky back in assorted colors. Just cut the felt into a donut size shape to fit perfectly around your tweeters. The imaging is greatly improved! It has a nice stock or OEM look to it, and the felt is easily removable. The sticky adhesive stays on the felt, not your speaker if you ever decide to remove them for whatever reason.

Paul's comment:

This works because reflections from the tweeter, bouncing off of the speaker's baffle have been dramatically reduced. You can even layer several thin sheets of felt to achieve the appropriate amount of damping, but one sheet is usually sufficient.

Having been involved with speaker manufaturing I can tell you that there are a variety of reasons why this is not universally applied to a speaker's design. Perhaps the single largest reason this is not used would be appearance; it does look a little cheap on the outside baffle of the speaker. Another reason would be that the designer did his best to compensate for the baffles reflection in the first place, but my experience (limited as it is) is that this addition helps most any design.

One note of caution: if the felt sheet gets too thick it can hamper the radiation pattern of the tweeter's side lobes so it is important to keep the damping material as thin as possible.

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