Loudspeakers

The quest to fabricate light, stiff driver cones with excellent internal damping properties, and main resonances pushed out beyond their passbands, is an increasingly popular trend with progressive loudspeaker brands. In addition to carbon fibre-reinforced cones, pure ceramic and foam-sandwich style driver materials, metal alloys are also popular. Anodised alloy cones are employed by YG Acoustics [HFN Dec '22], KEF [HFN Jun '23], MartinLogan [HFN Jul '23] and PS Audio [HFN Jun '22 & Apr '23] to name but a few recent examples, while Monitor Audio uses ceramic-coated alloy diaphragms in its C-CAM drivers [HFN Oct '21].

To this list of hi-fi household names comes Canton with its 'ceramic' tweeter and 'titanium/graphite' mid and bass drivers. The former is an alloy dome that's oxidised down through 20% of its thickness (aluminium oxide is the 'ceramic'). The 'titanium/graphite' cones are produced for Canton by a third-party specialist – the cones are actually an aluminium/titanium alloy 'treated in a chemical bath' but Canton refused to be drawn on the 'graphite' component. Is this a titanium/aluminium/carbide layer or simply powdered graphite added to colour the cone during oxidation in the bath? Your guess is as good as mine... PM