Tweeter Dimming, DIY Tweeter Pad

Are you suffering from high frequency fatigue each time your are listening to music on your stereo system? Is your HT system too bright sounding, that your ears bleed from gun shot sounds and what nots? Maybe you only experience high frequency love bites on certain CDs or LPs?

The above symptoms common with many beginner set ups. They are a result of a variety of possible causes. Chief amongst them are poor speaker to room placement, seating position error, room modes to speaker interaction, poorly matched equipment, cheap or fake silver cables, wrong tweaks application, and probably many , more reason caused by poorly set up system. On the flip side, is bass boom, or simply not enough bass. Well, that's another side of the problem.

Saw this tweak available for lunch money and thought maybe I should just try it for fun, even though my system never exhibited any of the high frequency symptoms as mentioned above. My system at some point many moons ago did exhibited some of the high frequency issues but I have since learned to fix them on a fundamental level, i.e. fix the source of the issue, not treating the symptoms with band aid. I think this tweak clearly belongs to the band aid category, if one is looking to fix an overly hot tweeter issue!  

The tweeter pad came as a pair, it's a square felt like material die-cut with generic tweeter hole and comes with double side tape on one side for easy application to tweeter. 

My PMC IB2i before tweeter pad treatment

And tadaa! with tweeter pad treatment

I bought the item and went home with the merchandise. As I started to play some music, I started the first 30 minutes just listening my system as is. Then I stopped the music, and put on the tweeter pad to the tweeter on my speakers. The whole process is rather easy as all it took was 10 minutes or less.

I restarted my music, the very same music I played 30 minutes ago. Right away, I noticed some minor difference to the sound. The good thing is that the vocal size became 50 cent sized(using old Malaysian coin standards, which are much bigger in diameter than the current 50 sen coin), which is certainly a good thing for vocal biased audiophiles. The cons(in any tweak no matter the cost, there is always pros & cons! You invariably win some & lose some too!) are, my system had lost it's spatial cues, yes, the back ground was blacker(if there's such a thing!) but the sound became less airy too! Yes, the vocal was now super focused, but it sounded like the singer needed lozenges to sooth his or her throat, i.e. vocal sounded dry! I kept the tweak on my tweeter for a few days, just to let it settle down, hoping the cons will be reduced in time, or maybe we just get used to the sound!

However, it was not to be, I still hear the cons as mentioned above more then any pros the tweak made to my system. I finally decide to remove the tweak for good. Maybe pass it on to someone who need a band aid for hot tweeters. My advise is to work on fixing the fundamental issues if one's system has a problem. Band aids are just that, they help your to cover up the rough spots, but at what price? What other compromise? I think band aids like this can work if your speakers are truly stuck in position due to home minister approval requirement, or for room aesthetics matter, then it may be a solution. However, it's not my preferred solution.