#Cts piezo tweeter driver#
#Cts piezo tweeter series#

Since the actual displacements are very small (measured in millionths of an inch), the practical applications for piezoelectricity were slow in coming. That is, when an electrical field is impressed across the crystal, it undergoes a physical deformation. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that this phenomenon is a reversible one. The correct pronunciation is pi e' zo however, Pe a' zo (the Latin pronunciation) has become as common. They named the phenomenon piezoelectricity, from the Greek meaning 'pressure' electricity. They found that certain natural crystals generate an electric field under the influence of a mechanical force. Background Piezoelectricity was discovered by Jacque and Pierre Curie in the late 1880s. It is the purpose of this article to help the user attain the maximum benefits from pie-zohs, pizzas, pee-zoids, or whatever else they have been called. Used improperly, however, they fail to meet their potential.

#Cts piezo tweeter driver#

The best thing about the piezo driver is that it is very very cheap! On MCM electronics you can buy these things for under a dollar in some configurations, though the threaded powerline version may be a few dollars by itself.1 CTS Piezoelectric Tweeters Introduction Piezo tweeters, in use for 30 years now, offer a quality cost-effective, high-frequency sound source in a rugged, highefficiency package when used properly. I'd be very interested to know what you think. I guess you won't really know how it sounds until you try it. It still doesn't hurt anything to use the two resistors mentioned above. You can open up the driver by removing the screws on the back and verify that it contains these elements.

#Cts piezo tweeter series#

The CTS Powerline series of piezo drivers, as I recall, have a built-in resistor and a small incandescent lamp as a limiter, thus the advertised rating that they will handle something like 400 watts. This resistor arrangement prevents the driver from appearing to the amplifier as a pure capacitive load, and is therfore a little bit 'safer' since it can't encourage high frequency oscillation in the amplifier's output circuit. It's more common in better designs to have the piezo connected to the amplifier through at least a resistor, perhaps in the range of 20 ohms, and there is often another resistor across the terminals of the drive, perhaps 100 ohms or so. For this reason, they can actually be connected directly to the output of an amplifier without any crossover at all, and this is the way they are used in a lot of fairly cheap speaker systems. 35 mfd cap, so it is almost infinite in impedance at lower frequencies and only becomes a significant load to the amplifier at very high frequencies far above the range of hearing. The typical piezo element is, I believe, equivalent to a. The piezo element itself (the circular piece of crystal material to which the leads are attached) would measure pretty much as a capacitor. It just depends on how it works and what the player thinks about it, in the end.Īs you've found, the impedance appears to be totally unlike a standard speaker. But if the Leslie is in a large church or big room, the tilt toward the high end might actually be beneficial. I suppose the lower limit of the frequency response is not as low as it would be with a good dynamic compression driver, and the higher frequencies might in fact be somewhat overly accentuated. So, using a piezo in a Leslie might just work. I even used some of these M-10 boxes to augment a modern Rodgers installation a couple years ago, and they sound wonderful in that one. Rodgers organs sold back in the 1980's almost always had piezo tweeters, the work-horse speaker system they used being the M-10, an arrangement of 6x9 full-range speakers augmented by four piezo tweeters. Piezo tweeters get a lot of flack and are often considered cheap junk, but in truth they have been used quite a bit in the organ world. Although I haven't heard it in action yet, I know the Leslie was in daily service and no complaints of the tone were brought to my attention. Someone explaining the intricacies of the Piezo speaker Īnyhow, just curious if anyone here has had experience with these or similar speakers, their interaction with the standard leslie crossover, and any other info you'd care to share. Some searches have brought up that this is a Piezo driver, which has a very high impedance.

There is built-in circuit protection and I assume some capacitor, as the resistance climbs from low Meg-ohm to infinite. The first thing I noticed is that you can't measure the impedance of the speaker.

The V-21 was replaced with an odd looking CTS 'powerline' branded tweeter with no markings indicating model or impedance. I pulled the amp immediately and while I wait for parts, have begun servicing the cabinet (Although the 6550's test very poorly, the amp runs). A 122 is through the shop right now for reasons of some cabinet issues and the Leslie fuse had blown.