Speaker cone shape

I just had a look at Vienna Acoustics, even those are not completely flat, but very nearly, well that's how they come across in the images.

They say: "The plane surface of the spidercone offers the advantage of precise, piston-like movement. Any diaphragm should move in and out as one unit, not as a quivering mass of uncorrelated vibrations. It should move as a perfectly-solid piston. The flat cone is extremely stiff, with bracings of a height of 18 mm (bass) and 14 mm (mid), yet light, respectively, further reinforced by glass fibers in our new X4P mixture."

Interesting video. So there are advantages to flat drivers. How much difference you can actually hear is another question.

But as the surface is at an angle the air can’t be pushed along the axis of the speaker only toward the centre. If you move something through the air at an angle the air doesn’t get pushed directly forward, it always moves in the direction of the trailing edge, which would be the centre of the cone.

I'm beginning to realise there is enough known and unknown to keep your brain occupied for a lifetime :^).

I have just built a set of 3 way units with new 8" Kevlar - 6.5" Kevlar - 4" Silk, and better crossover units. They are rebuilt in a pair of cabinets I already had, I just relined the cabinets with acoustic absorbing material. For some reason, as to which one of you will no doubt enlighten me, they sound even better when the 6.5" are wired out of phase with the 8" & 4".

Hmm, seems to be a can of worms then?

Well this has been interesting.  So though there is science involved and calculations to make, and I dare say the implementation of aspects of others previous design successes to assist with the design of a good speaker system, the bottom line is once you have done all that and built your speaker, suck it and see seems to be the final process.

What I meant by "suck it and see", is reading the posts, despite any science or past design experiments, be that of cone shape, cabinet or any other aspect of the speaker design, the bottom line seems to be you have no guarantee that it will sound any better to you than something put together in your garage out of available parts. You design it, build it, take all the available measurements, but it's not until you listen to it, do you find out how good or bad it is. Just like a new recipe, despite having all the best ingredients you don't know until you taste it. Add to that the fact that tastes in how speakers sound vary, along with all the other variables, and what you said becomes the deciding factor be they $$$ latest tech or not, if they sound good to you, they are good.

@pch300 

Many thanks,

I have a better idea of what's going on, and it gives me more to research.