There is alot of myth and voodoo in audio. I don't buy into the
smaller drivers have better attack, punch, etc. I don't think the
ligher cone plays a big role either. I think Adire had a white paper
on this?

Based on my listening experience what gives me punch is SPL and
amplifier headroom. I think it's that simple. I can drive my
8" midrange rated for 100db sensivity with a 600 watt bridged amp
(160v headroom) and I have amazing punch and the crack from the
snare drum is ear shattering on transients. People using horn
speakers say the same thing about punch, well they get alot of
SPL from horns and if you amp has alot of headroom the transients
will have less distortion.

I have an NSB array and the speaker cones are treated with 6 coats of
lacque and there is just as much punch as without the mod, the only
difference is a slight loss of sensitivity by doing this mod but the
sound is superior to the untreated speaker. The loss of sensivitiy
does get interpreted as not playing as louder unmodded but to offset this I just turn up the amp a few notches.

Recently I did an interesting NSB array test to see how much punch
I can get form the NSB array. The system is full active with two
amplifiers and 'digital' crossover. The NSB's are wired for 2 ohms
per channel and a QSC RMX 2450 drives them. The amp is rated for
about 1200w/ch @ 2 ohm. The NSB's are rated for 5 watts rms and I've
clipped the amp on ocassion and there is no burning smell from the
speakers so the array is handling that power playing music which has
a much lower duty cycle than playing sine waves in which case I
probably would be smoking the NSB's -> {which I have done on my test
bench prior to building the array}.

The punch is pretty good as the amplifier has 110v rails so the clipping headroom is about 110v.

The lastest test I did was to bridge the QSC for 220v of headroom
and test one tower. The problem is. The amp is not rated for 2 ohms
in bridged mode but because the NSB's are not going to draw tons of
power I figured it would work and it did.

Having that extra power/headroom was noted, but I felt that it was
too much for the poor ole NSB to handle as I didn't want to push it
to 100% continuously, I did clip the amp to test the sound and it
was pretty intense. I played music at 75% from clipping and I had the
perception of more punch just because I increased the power/headroom.
I also had an uncanny sense of more depth to the sound but I can't
form final conclusion doing an auditon in mono, I need another
amp to do the test in stereo. Who knows, I had do it. /lol
I may do the long overdue ferrofluid mod to the NSB in which case
the power handling get a huge boost but I don't know the long
term {years} effects of having coolant inside the drivers because
of the materials used to create the driver. Since these are 49 cent
speakers I probably will mod another 32 of them {I have 288 more
in stock} with the coolant and get another amp to show people
what a 49 cent driver can do mated with 5kw of power. /evil

/fun stuff