what is the real difference between rf-82 vs r-28f? Hekp

[moray james]

Fish: I don't want you to see my comment as an attack against what you said. I simply don't want people to draw the wrong conclusions about aluminum diaphragms.

No issue M, I admit I'm mostly a listener not a technician. I have however set  Klipsch with an aluminum di in the same spot as a ref speaker of similar size, same volume(loud), same test. The results were at about a foot away the aluminum tweeter was very uncomfortable to listen to. The Titanium tweeter was relatively smooth and did not offend my ears. I found the aluminum fine at lower volume, but I like to turn it up occasionally.

 

I did have to edit for a ? What about soft dome on Klipsch, bad, terrible ? If I could pick any substance to hear it would be ceramic/alum oxide or composite looks very interesting. Of course Beryllium is the gold standard we all wish was plentiful and cheap, lol.

Hey Fish: I did a small edit myself above. I would not call the design capability of Klipsch into question as they have plenty of top design power in house and their ethic is excellent no matter what they are designing. This all falls back (in my opinion) to QC and the parts which are being outsourced. I do not doubt that you are hearing what you say that you are. It's just that I know that quality aluminum alloy diaphragms break up well above titanium not below. The finest sounding pro compression drive diaphragms are made of aluminum alloy not titanium, titanium diaphragms flood the market because of their durability not their sound quality. What this says to me is cheap parts or parts which have been allowed to drift from original spec to an unacceptable level of distortion. This could be the fault of a number of things from the materials used like a change in alloy or the profile of the diaphragm or the phase plug to the physical assembly even the quantity type or application of an adhesive could all have serious detrimental affect on the sound quality.

When you have a multitude of line there has to be a reason to move up to buy the top of the line. While this was never a Klipsch trait but we need to remember the present market and also that Paul is long gone. When you pay more you should demand and expect more of the level of performance.

Parts that move more are not going to be as good as parts that move less. That is a given. Generally soft diaphragms have far greater distortion but that is not to say that good sounding ones have not been made. This all just keeps coming back to execution. The ball was dropped and someone needs to pick it back up. Building ti diaphragms that sound good is not a trivial task and requires care and much attention to detail. I know for a fact that both Klipsch and Crites have gone out of stock on ti diaphragms because parts supplied did not meet spec this is not an infrequent situation. This is kind of like buying a car made on a Monday or a Friday. Best regards Moray James.