Kef Oclee Jack-Brown states that its an aluminium dome with other materials. Which may indicate a coating over it as compared to the mid driver being a lithium, magnesium, aluminium affair according to their own documents. Likely both drivers are coated to give additional damping and protection. Also, I recall an article which added that their shaping is not quite a spherical dome and this added to the overall stiffness sending the breakup a bit higher. This might be the ring mentioned but the non spherical shape is likely additive.
They statement from Stone Studios agree with my prior post of not being self damping material, or just as poor as aluminium in self damping. But since its nice old stiff material, its self damping becomes irrelevant in audio applications.
Agreeably, any diaphragm material that can resonate and even dampen the final sound. The degree of transparency improvement will exist, but it would mainly manifest itself in the treble, being produced a bit more cleanly than otherwise without, as it will have lower resonant energy from the diaphragm to contend with. Lower coloration and cleaner production.
The transparency description you provide indicates additional design choices by Paradigm to further treble presence. Which as you can surely expect, will make some recordings quite annoying. Great music, bad mastering. The Kef Blade is a very neutral transducer and very even in its dispersion handoff. Its honestly astonishingly linear across the audio band. Not the widest and they don't intend it to be such, but the shaping of the UniQ midrange and the wave guide on the tweeter had the objective of bettering the pairing between the two drivers. When you review some of the measurements, they achieved that goal quite well, but at the expense of some frequency response width. Particularly at the mids. A very good result with only a minor compromise.
I am curios to see that results of the lateral response tests. The acoustic lenses are an interesting approach to overcome the dispersion difference between that large mid range and tweeter. On the Prestige series, that part of its sound wasn't successful at all and it meant a whole lot of extra time in setup to get the sound right. Something like some of the Kef's I had owned are a bit less fussy to get into the right territory. Once there, its fine tuning to get it just to where you like the balance.
They statement from Stone Studios agree with my prior post of not being self damping material, or just as poor as aluminium in self damping. But since its nice old stiff material, its self damping becomes irrelevant in audio applications.
Agreeably, any diaphragm material that can resonate and even dampen the final sound. The degree of transparency improvement will exist, but it would mainly manifest itself in the treble, being produced a bit more cleanly than otherwise without, as it will have lower resonant energy from the diaphragm to contend with. Lower coloration and cleaner production.
The transparency description you provide indicates additional design choices by Paradigm to further treble presence. Which as you can surely expect, will make some recordings quite annoying. Great music, bad mastering. The Kef Blade is a very neutral transducer and very even in its dispersion handoff. Its honestly astonishingly linear across the audio band. Not the widest and they don't intend it to be such, but the shaping of the UniQ midrange and the wave guide on the tweeter had the objective of bettering the pairing between the two drivers. When you review some of the measurements, they achieved that goal quite well, but at the expense of some frequency response width. Particularly at the mids. A very good result with only a minor compromise.
I am curios to see that results of the lateral response tests. The acoustic lenses are an interesting approach to overcome the dispersion difference between that large mid range and tweeter. On the Prestige series, that part of its sound wasn't successful at all and it meant a whole lot of extra time in setup to get the sound right. Something like some of the Kef's I had owned are a bit less fussy to get into the right territory. Once there, its fine tuning to get it just to where you like the balance.