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Saving the best for last. Olivier Visan's Davis Acoustic MV One from France is a classic 94dB efficient widebander in a cunningly non-classic box. This ~7" paper-cone driver with outer graphite skin and inner Latex layer driven from an impedance-stabilized Alnico 6 motor and foam surround plays in a perfectly conventional rectangular cab with a front-firing bottom slot. The wrinkle? That opening is neither the horn mouth of a complex inner line nor a Sonus faber Venere-style slot port. It's a simple breathing hole without any duct or chamber. Whilst Davis experimented with all manner of complicated loadings spanning the gamut of transmission lines, rear horns and their various hybrids, this unusual but ultra-basic recipe worked best in the end.

With claimed response of 40Hz to 20.000kHz, actual in-room performance with the counter-intuitively most copasetic amps in inventory—very powerful class AB EL30m monos from Australia's SGR Audio—signed off roughly on the former spec. But it certainly did not on the latter. Cymbals and triangles showed insufficient upper harmonics and the recreation of recorded 3D space wasn't properly specific compared to speakers with dedicated tweeters.


Quoting verbatim from my MV One review, "still too high up in frequency to render cymbals completely brassy, what the Sopraninos did instead was light up the stage and embolden tone. This was uncanny on say a quality ECM production of Greek pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos and Anja Lechner whose con arco cello tone benefited too [Melos]. Aside from sonic gains Ivette even thought that the add-on tweeters made the plain French boxes look better and more interesting. I agree.


"Of all the speakers I've tried the Sopranino with, this was without doubt the most powerful pairing. It reminded me of my friend Dan. His Voxativ Ampeggio Due with field-coil drivers are topped by Acapella ion tweeters which he swears by. Now I could relate.


"What Engima's costly add-ons did for soundstage specificity where spatial relationships crystallize properly was terrific. In ways whose mechanics I don't fully understand the benefits to wetter more radiant tone far outside their operating range were just as real. Seeing how my more lit-up amp cadre of Crayon to Bakoon wasn't as copasetic as the SGR monos, the Sopraninos would remain put for the duration of this review." Completing the brilliance region of a 0-xover widebander whose diameter is larger to make proper bass ought to be one prime recommended use for this super tweeter. Without screwing up the purist concept—no insertion of a low-pass filter on the widebander—the Sopranino adds itself just as a subwoofer in augmentation rather than filter mode would.


Here the transformation of a slightly dull hooded top end and its effects on recorded reflections and upper-harmonic performer halos was key. Over the remainder of its bandwidth this speaker after all was the very opposite of dull and hooded. It exhibited all the standard virtues of unfettered directness and quicksilvery reflexes you'd expect from a properly designed widebander without reactive or energy-absorptive parts between its voice coil and your amp's speaker outputs. Accelerating and building out its 1.5 top octaves to match up the rest did the very thing that hilarious scene of As good as it gets poked fun at when a female fan positively gushes at misogynist celebrity author Jack Nicholson. "You complete me." The Sopranino really did complete the MV One as though it were mandatory equipment. This wraps up our lengthy tour on the highest possible note.


Conclusion. My round of experiments suggest that the Sopranino super tweeter isn't a universally applicable, necessary or beneficial panacea. To need its cure first requires that one suffer the right disease. Here I'd single out two ideal maladies. One would be the high-number multi-way speaker whose in-room power response of a small 1" tweeter is completely swamped out by paralleled midranges and two or more large woofers. The moment you spot an exploded d'Appolito array of 1 x tweeter, 2 x midranges and 4 x woofers, think super tweeter unless the built-in tweeter were a tall ribbon or AMT. The other prime scenario would be a large Ø widebander of the 7-inch + sort. Its predictably rolled-off brilliance region will get very nicely filled in without otherwise interfering with the 0-xover concept. Speakers with highly dynamic tweeters like Gallo's 180°-dispersion CDTIII, Elac's omni or Mark + Daniel's built-in upfiring ambient tweeter are inherently complete already. They're super-tweeter'd as is. Another practical factor is room size and seating distance. HF losses in the nearfield of the desktop don't factor. No assist required. The same is less and less true the farther away you sit and the smaller/weaker your tweeter is to begin with. Under the proper conditions—facing an actual shortcoming—the Sopranino add-on super tweeter can indeed be a very effective completer and then should be investigated very seriously.
ENIGMA Acoustics website