ScanSpeak Discovery D2608/9130 1" Textile Dome HDS Tweeter

This is one of a three part review. One for this tweeter, one for Silver Flute W17RC38-08 woofer and one for the LEAP design service by Madisound.

I had a pair of .75 cu ft MTM cabinets lying around from a years old non-finished project. I also had a pair of the Silver Flute W17RC38-08 woofers not used. I decided to order another pair of the Silver Flutes and, using some old Euro tweeters assemble the speakers s a MTM design just to see what they would sound like. I crossed them over at 2 khz. They did not sound too bad at all.

I decided to upgrade the old tweeters so I emailed Madisound asking for a recommendation for new tweeters with a $50 price point each. Adam at Madisound suggested stretching my budget to $75.00 and get these tweeters, which I did. The minute I installed them the speakers came alive. I was amazed at how good they sounded. They go low, so the mid range is especially good for vocals. They go high without being bright, like a metal tweeter would be. I decided to push the design a little farther by using a correctly designed crossover.

I am no expert at crossovers so I had Madisound do a LEAP design for these ScanSpeak tweeters and the Silver Flute woofers. Then I had them assemble the crossovers using quality parts.

I ported the speakers with a 3” port 5.5 inches long. The speakers sit 20” off the floor on metal stands I designed and a metal artist friend of mine made. This puts the tweeters at ear level when one is sitting listening to them.

Once installed all I can say is wow, do these sound good. Very smooth. Vocals are astounding. I can listen to them for hours. I hear things I never heard before in my music. I do have a sub-woofer but only use it on older recordings as older recordings seem to lack bass.

I want to thank Madisound (and Adam) for their help and guidance. I highly recommend these tweeters. Buy them, you won't regret it.

This is a great tweeter, and everyone raves about the audio performance. I agree with those opinions. Probably anything better in performance than this one will cost more than $200.

But this tweeter has two irritating problems. Firstly, there are no markings to indicate polarity on the terminals. I had to actually connect a dry cell to the terminals to note dome movement to figure out which one is positive. This is really irritating. Later I noted that there are what appear to be smudges of white paint on the positive terminal (the one which, when it receives a positive potential, pushes the dome outward), and no such smudges on the negative terminal. This is a ridiculous and needlessly obscure way for the builder to figure out terminal polarity.

The second problem is the quality of the rubber-like material on which the male QC leads are mounted. These black blocks are made of a crazily heat-sensitive material. Three seconds (literally) of contact with a 50W soldering iron makes the black substance so soft that it melts and the QC lead moves. Ten seconds of contact and the block may melt away, allowing the QC lead to break apart. It has ruined one of my tweeters. There are dozens of different types of plastics and polymers available today into which you can embed a QC clip and which will witstand a few hundred degress Celcius of soldering heat without softening. Why did the manufacturer choose this ridiculous material? I have used plenty of tweeters from Vifa, Peerless, North Creek, and others, and never found any terminal block material to be so heat-sensitive. And these are the most expensive tweeters I am using.

I feel that one small step Madisound can take to help buyers is to display, prominently on the product web page, that "white paint smudges on one terminal block indicate that it is the positive terminal."

This is my favorite tweeter in the <$200 category. Very open and natural sounding, shows the engineers did a lot of work. Other tweeters I've used that I believe aren't quite as good as this HDS are: Seas T25C001, BG Neo3, Fountek CD2.0, Dayton RS28.