The 4 Best Tweeter Speakers for Car Audio
What are the best car tweeters for your car audio system? Well, plenty of car audio tweeters make the list, including dome tweeters, bullet tweeters and super tweeters, but chances are, a truly great car tweeter speaker didn’t come stock with your car.
Most factory stock speakers are 2-way, or coaxial speakers, meaning each woofer cone and tweeter dome are paired into a single speaker frame, with the tweeter dome mounted in the center of the woofer cone (hence, sharing the same center axis). Although an efficient use of space, and easy to install, these dampen the precision of both mid-range and high-end frequencies.
By installing a discrete, component audio system, you use separate speakers for tweeter and woofer channels, driving more accurate bass, and much clearer higher frequencies. These are your car tweeter speaker options.
1. Hard Dome Tweeters
The most common car tweeters employ a dome shaped diaphragm, which vibrates to reproduce high frequencies. Most of these car audio tweeters are made with metal, most often aluminum or titanium. While these can produce loud and bright treble frequencies, due to their hardness, they also tend to resonate around certain frequencies, distorting output to some degree. For this reason, hard dome tweeters tend to be less expensive and of lower quality. The exception is car tweeters with domes made of a softer and rarer metal, beryllium, used only on very high end systems.
2. Soft Dome Tweeters
An alternative to hard dome car audio tweeters are soft dome tweeters. Modern versions of these often use synthetic plastic, but the best car tweeter speakers of this type use silk. Silk dome tweeters don’t play as loud or bright as metal dome tweeters, but neither do they have a resonance issue. And for some, the soft roll-off of higher frequencies sounds better to the ear than the sharper hard domes provide.
3. Bullet Tweeters
Also referred to as horn tweeters, bullet tweeters get their name from the bullet shaped dome at the center of a flared horn design. Owing to these shapes, bullet tweeters produce louder output, which can be of use when a car audio system has a powerful subwoofer to balance out. Bullet tweeters don’t tend to resonate in audible frequencies the way hard dome tweeters do, they don’t disperse sound waves as well. While this aspect prevents bullet speakers from being a sound option in home audio, they can work well as car tweeter speakers, because they’re ideal for near field signals in small, confined spaces.
4. Super Tweeters
Most often the bullet tweeters used as car audio tweeters are also super tweeters. Used as part of a component speaker system, super tweeter is designed to specialize in reproducing higher trble frequencies, in much the same way a subwoofer specializes in lower bass frequencies. For example, if a soft dome car tweeter rolls off at the higher end, adding a super tweeter can replace the brightness and punch. Or if a hard dome speaker resonates at higher frequencies, those frequencies can be crossed over to super tweeters to replace that part of the signal without distortion.
Find the best car tweeters at Car Audio City in San Diego, CA
Installing a component speaker system is the best way to upgrade a car’s factory-stock audio system, and selecting the best car audio tweeters will ensure your sound is crisp and free of distortion. Call us today at (619) 474-8551 to find out how!
