5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use Aluminum Cones in Your DIY Speakers! (Most will Miss #3)

Don't care about #1 and #2 because that can be handled . Not sure about #3 . But nobody ever mentions metal fatigue . Alu is an exception wrt to metal fatigue . Steel and titanium have an explicit maximum distortion limit which guarantees the material will never break if distortions are kept below that limit . No such limit exists for alu . This means that how ever low you keep the distortion , eventually the material will break . It will break ofcourse later if you keep distortions small , but break it will .

what about carbon fiber cones?

alu pretty good mid bass in a 3 way

So what are the best cone materials in your opinion???

Ban aluminum in speakers all together cough ~*Klipsch*~ cough ~*SVS*~ cough

I avoid paper cones bcus i live near the equator with high humidity and temps.

I really wish you guys would use the correct term. It is not 'dampening' but 'damping'.

I have a couple of aluminum cones in my subs, and they sound excellent. For the rest, I wouldn't use them

Well designed components > Material of components

I listen to my kef q350s for hours on end, for diy i don't know

My monitor audio bronze 😢

Nick, Great Info. Keep it up.

Some pretty true facts in this video !

Please don't spread misinformation. Alluminium can be a fine cone material, e.g. often used by Kef and also SB Acoustics makes some excelent drivers. The shape of the cone is important to reduce the resonances, e.g. the Dayton Audio RS shown in the video is a bad example. For tweeters alluminium can actually be less harsh sounding, just make sure that the cone break-up is well above 20 kHz which it usually is. The benefit of alluminium vs paper is the additional clarity due to the material hardness, operating closer to an ideal piston. For subwoofers alluminium is also excellent and can reduce thermal compression. Especially in a 3-way design allumnium can be an excelent choice

Paul Carmody's Overnight Sensation series of designs used alloy metal HIVI mid-woofers and Jeff Bagby had a small design with an now out of production metal cone woofer. Both were reported to sound quite nice. The tweeter selected must be able to be crossed low enough to not see the cone breakup, as with some paper or poly cone woofers.

I don't agree. Some aluminum drivers might have this problem but some don't. I have an all aluminum tower speaker I built and it uses 5 components in the crossover. It has none of these problems.

I couldn't be happier with my Dayton RS225s.

I think it comes down to how well the driver is designed. A well made aluminum cone driver should have zero ringing within the driver itself. Meaning it's more than likely not going to be cheap. As mentioned it depends on your budget. If you are trying to go cheap. Probably best to stick with a paper cone driver. They should offer more quality for the buck.

I have small PC speaker Logitech Z50 with just one small full-range crossoverless aluminium speaker - and it sounds very sweet and natural. Most time better than paper. Tweeter with aluminium diaphragm can sound pleasant to - softer than titanium and crispier than silk at the same time. So may be your theory have some background, but there are to many exceptions in real life)) And small paper fullrange speakers by the way mostly sound very harsh and dry, from them I have ears fatique realy soon.

Aluminum cones are for peasants. I only use mithril for my audio gear. You should hear my adamantium tweeter!

I found the last 2 paper cone dayton classic 18 in subwoofer and love them

I agree that aluminium cones are not ideal for DYI beginners. But most of the issues you have named can easily be identified in the measurements and avoided by proper crossover design. If one chooses a lowpass frequency a fair amount of Hz away from breakup frequency, even below first directivity anomalies appear, everything about harshness, resonances and breakup is basically becoming a non-issue.

For me, fragility is the exclusion factor when choosing a driver. I prefer speakers without a cover or grille, so an aluminum cone is the worst possible choice. One second of carelessness and you can buy a new speaker chassis. Even if there are very good speaker chassis with an aluminum cone. They are simply too vulnerable for me.