Printer Friendly Forum Posts - tweeter placement above/below mid

Are there any benefits/drawbacks to mounting the tweeter below the mid? The mounts taper up and back towards the listener. If the mid were oriented above the tweeter, it would be about 4 inches closer to the listener. I can mount the drivers either way without any clearance issues. How will this affect the sound stage? The components are Focal 100Kp, the TN52 tweeter has a reputation for being slightly fatiguing.

Thanks

The most important thing is to mount the tweeters close to the mid driver. If there are to be pluses or minuses assigned to orientation based on "above or below", I'd venture to guess that the plus goes to the tweeter being mounted below the mid. The tweeter's driver plane is inherently more forward than the mid driver's voice coil (because of the depth of the mid's cone), so separating it further away from your ears may equalize the planes of the two drivers a bit. Just a small difference, parts of an inch, between planes tends to cause the mid drivers' response to drop off steeply at around the crossover point and result in deterioration in that frequency range.

Sometimes you'll have a situation where there are contours in the door panel that you may be able to take advantage of when placing the tweeter vs. mid. If the tweeter is set back into a contour so that its driver plane is fairly even with the mid's, time alignment is better. Placement at just a few inches above, below or to the side of the mid, in that case, is a negligible value.

Example, in my car: Nothing flashy but the alignment is good.

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If I had a flat panel to work with and mounted the tweeter flush with the panel, then choosing to go below the (center of the) mid (and therefore farther away from the ear) would probably be the best choice. But best advice is to always rig the tweeter temporarily in a few locations until you've tested for best sound.