Hi,
Well I had a few neodymium magnets laying around and an hour to put on last night so I decided to make a ribbon tweeter! I had some steel bar I got from B&Q for something else but only needed a bit of it so I cut off two 20cm lengths and then glued some magnets to it. I then glued some cut off scraps of CPU heatsink between each end to separate the bars.
I cut a length of aluminium foil, standard stuff from the kitchen cupboard, and fixed it to each end with some double sided sticky-tape.
It worked!
I then went back to the table and glued on some more magnets and cut a more accurate, not so wide bit of foil (it was too wide before, lacking high frequencies) and then pleated it by squashing it between two bits of single sided corrugated card.
A fair bit of fiddling to get it to sit nicely between the magnets and away we go!
I added a 470uF cap to cut the very low frequencies which helped. I also put in a 2 ohm resistor just to give the amp some load. I could use a smaller cap, but I quite liked getting lows out of it! Just can't go louder than normal speech level, lol.
And how does it sound? Well, it works surprisingly well!! In fact I am amazed when I think that I made the whole thing in about 2 hours from scraps I had laying about the house.
I took a recording of it, which you can hear, yes there is bass! The mic is about 4 inches from the ribbon so thats why you can hear the bass but it is actually coming from the ribbon and you can hear it if you are close. It sounds a bit clearer in real life.
http://www.audiosmile.co.uk/Ribbon.mp3
Like I said, not bad for something done in the kitchen, and looking as it does
Well I had a few neodymium magnets laying around and an hour to put on last night so I decided to make a ribbon tweeter! I had some steel bar I got from B&Q for something else but only needed a bit of it so I cut off two 20cm lengths and then glued some magnets to it. I then glued some cut off scraps of CPU heatsink between each end to separate the bars.
I cut a length of aluminium foil, standard stuff from the kitchen cupboard, and fixed it to each end with some double sided sticky-tape.
It worked!
I then went back to the table and glued on some more magnets and cut a more accurate, not so wide bit of foil (it was too wide before, lacking high frequencies) and then pleated it by squashing it between two bits of single sided corrugated card.
A fair bit of fiddling to get it to sit nicely between the magnets and away we go!
I added a 470uF cap to cut the very low frequencies which helped. I also put in a 2 ohm resistor just to give the amp some load. I could use a smaller cap, but I quite liked getting lows out of it! Just can't go louder than normal speech level, lol.
And how does it sound? Well, it works surprisingly well!! In fact I am amazed when I think that I made the whole thing in about 2 hours from scraps I had laying about the house.
I took a recording of it, which you can hear, yes there is bass! The mic is about 4 inches from the ribbon so thats why you can hear the bass but it is actually coming from the ribbon and you can hear it if you are close. It sounds a bit clearer in real life.
http://www.audiosmile.co.uk/Ribbon.mp3
Like I said, not bad for something done in the kitchen, and looking as it does
