SUMMER MUSINGS: Paired speaker testing, more crossover thoughts, running tests ourselves and for ALL speaker reviews!

Paradigm Signature S8 v.3 speakers with grilles off. miniDSP UMIK-1 microphone for some simple testing with Room EQ Wizard (REW).

Well it's summertime which means (hopefully) a bit more opportunity to enjoy the nice weather around here in Vancouver with the family, more time to listen to music, maybe a little trip out of town on weekends.

As for my audiophile interests, it also gives me time to think about the broad topics and maybe run a little bit of testing here and there. Often these summer articles flesh out ideas and results covered over the last few months I may have left aside or on the "cutting floor" when writing.

This post will be along those lines in that these results were actually captured back in the January-February 2025 timeframe when I was doing the ferrofluid replacement for my tweeters, and then subsequent discussions about "audiophile" crossover parts and addressing beliefs of people like GR-Research/Danny Richie.

Since I grabbed these measurements and pictures when I was considering the importance (or not) of crossover part affecting sound quality, I thought I'd post them with some further summertime-meandering and related discussions.

DIY: Tweeter Ferrofluid Change - with pre- and post- frequency & distortion changes. And on-line amiability among hobbyists.

For this post, I thought I'd discuss a little DIY procedure you might want to think about if you've had your speakers for awhile - like say a decade or more - and know that the tweeter uses "ferrofluid". Not uncommon for tweeters since the 1970's.

Ferrofluid is a substance with ferromagnetic nanoparticles typically suspended inside an organic solvent. These particles are small enough that they're suspended by Brownian motion so over time, the particles do not settle. In tweeters, the ferrofluid surrounds the voice coil which is embedded in the gap between permanent magnets (do electromagnetic speakers use ferrofluid?).

There are benefits to doing this including improving heat transfer away from the wire coil to handle higher power, dampen vibrations (unwanted resonances), and I've heard it said that the ferrofluid can also help suspend the coil within the gap in a way that's better centered (lower distortion).

Now, depending on the type and quality of the ferrofluid, there is the potential that over time this stuff degrades. Some have said that it can dry out, or the consistency becoming more viscous over the years. Here's an interesting video showing degradation of very poor-quality ferrofluid.

Paradigm Signature S8 v.3 Tweeter Replacement. A word about importance of speakers (+ rooms). (And a link to a HDMI cable blind test.)

Paradigm Reference Signature S8 v.3 tweeters.

I mentioned in late August with my "Speaker Impedance - Part 2" post that I noticed a variance between the right and left speaker impedance from my Paradigm Signature S8 v.3 that I was going to track down.

While an ohm here and there might look innocuous on the impedance curves, sometimes this could be indicative of a significant imbalance between speakers. Since I'm a bit obsessive about these things, let's get down to the "nuts and bolts" of the speaker and have a closer listen and look at the frequency response in that frequency region...