Speaker cone shape

You are thinking air movement as opposed to pressure wave. Sound is not moving air, not in a linear movement sense. Cones do provide rigidity, naturally, in the axis of movement which potentially allows them to be lighter. Unlike Eric, I am quite fond of some ceramic drivers, however, there are pluses and minuses like almost every driver.


Don’t let people over complicate a ham sandwich. There are a lot of things that go into a world class speaker, much tech buried in drivers, some in capacitors, some in cabinets, some in acoustics (not as much as you would think for many companies), and yet, Wilson speakers was started by a staff writer at an audio magazine. No one, Dunlavy included knows everything, hence why he used off the shelf drivers, and his speakers were relatively traditional construction, just well optimized for his particular design goal (time/phase alignment) and tightly controlled in manufacturing.

There are far better forums to ask that question, many specifically on speaker design for DIYers, however, the most obvious answer would come down to phase angle introduced by your cross-over and the driver itself, such that the 6.5" wired in phase, is actually out of phase during the critical cross-over transition regions and is causing suck-out in the frequency response.  


What Vienna Acoustics wrote is no more than marketing. I cone moves as a complete signal unit every bit as much as a flat surface. It is meant to impress people who don't know what they are writing is just market speak.  Sort of like the Phase Technology guy claiming that his drivers are acoustically opaque to the back wave (and others are not), and yet his cone is only 3.1 grams (ignores the weight of the flat piece). If you believe that, I have some swamp land for you in Florida. Don't tell me in marketing speak, show me actual measurements that prove what you claim. If you can't show your driver has lower distortion, more even dispersion, lacks resonances, and can truly block the back wave, then it is just market speak. 


Don't get me wrong, designing a good speaker takes work, but as you will see in DIY sites, people with limited physics knowledge, by building on the work of others, can achieve very significant results.


(Side note, there is technical merit in Dunlavy's time and phase aligned design, however, that does not necessarily translate into higher levels of listener satisfaction. It has technical merit, but it is not proven out to be psychoacoustically critical. <-- Not even 1 area of physics needed.   Dunlavy didn't push the boundaries of any physics in his implementation and most of what was accomplished was "math", i.e. the mathematically modelling to achieve time alignment, but I digress). 

jasonbourne52396 posts04-22-2021 1:21pmManger makes flat diaphragm drivers that use the "bending wave" principle for phase coherence.

Great transient response, but frequency response is all over the map. His website dedicates much time to transients and location by transients, but seems to ignore all the other mechanisms for location that are frequency based. I guess it comes with the marketing territory. I can certainly appreciate the engineering of the driver. I have only heard them at an audio show. They were good. Not great, good. I found them no more or less realistic than other implementations.

I don't perceive flat speakers to have any inherent advantage in breakup. If anything a cone has more stiffness in the vector of movement.

mijostyn, that was pointed out about 20 posts ago ...

Essentially the old Infinity. They had some good ... and some bad. I am a fan of midranges in this size. Not many really good.