Those tweeters were $291 EACH ?!? I just got through coughing up $257 for two tweets and thought I was gonna sh!t but $291 for 1? That's almost in the RAAL range.
I told you those Hiquphons are modestly priced for high end tweets
.
My surrounds have
Seas Prestige 27TFFC tweeters. Before they were relegated to surround duty they were The Next Level. It's funny how fast the price starts going up on nice drivers.
Those 27TFFC tweets are a bargain. Dennis is good at finding good performers that sell at modest prices. In those MB27s, the tweeters cost nearly twice the price of the mid woofers. Of course the tweets were made in Norway and the mid woofers were made in India. Seas makes excellent drivers in the medium and high price ranges. They don't do cheap and they don't do extremely high priced.
I now remember hearing speakers with the Millenium tweeters. It was at my first DIY speaker meeting, 12 years ago. It was the meeting where Dennis Murphy and several others organized blind listening tests of speakers with different quality capacitors. There were over 40 people there, and no one could reliably hear differences between cheap non-polar electrolytic caps, modestly-priced metallized polypropylene caps, or exotically high-priced oxygen-free unobtanium caps. They were built into otherwise very good speakers, such as Dennis's MBOW1s. Each speaker had alternate crossovers that could be switched remotely by the listener.
At this same meeting, there were also quite a few speaker builders who brought their speakers to show. One guy proudly showed his 2-way speakers made with the Seas W18 woofer and the Millenium tweeter. (I remember thinking to myself at the time, that's way more money than I want to spend on speakers. How little I knew then
.) Interestingly, this guy made a classic mistake while doing the final assembly of his speakers the night before the meeting. He wired the tweeters with opposite polarity, they were out of phase with the woofers
. Dennis noticed it right away, but he didn't expose the obvious mistake publicly. Instead, he offered to measure his speakers, and pointed out privately the resulting deep suck out at the crossover frequency. It was probably embarrassing that he never heard the out of phase problem, because earlier that same day he argued prominently that he could easily hear the difference between the cheap and expensive capacitors. He was wrong twice that day.
Another commercially available and very high priced line of speakers feature these same Seas Excel drivers,
Joseph Audio. See the Pearl, Perspective and Pulsar models. If I recall, the small 2-way Pulsar costs nearly $8,000 a pair.
