Importance of speakers size

 

Magnet weight is not an electromagentic parameter that ever concerned James Clerk Maxwel or Michael Faraday, hence has no bearing on how speakers work.

 

Cabinet size is an issue to a specific configuration of speaker components, the engineering behind this is well understood by speaker builders even if the consumers don't understand it. You cannot put any speaker old driver into any old cabinet and expect good results.

 

You sure it's not the magnet that matters, not the speaker diameter?

 

I have better bass on my ESS HEIL AMT 750 with its 12 inch woofer, than my neighbor's boom bass sound on a Fender AMP which has a 15 inch woofer. His rattles and distorts before mine does! Of course, having a massive receiver helps to drive the speaker, instead of a cheapie! I can rattle the windows in my apartment and the neighbor will go ... TURN THAT THING DOWN! ... and I immediately switch to Alice Bowie! 

Bigger, horn-loaded speakers = bigger soundstage with more 3D imaging.

That's why when i first heard heritage line Klipsch speakers, it was love.

I'm a proud owner of Cornwall II's & Chorus II's. You can't take them from my cold, dead hands!!!!!

I thought doppler distortion is supposedly worse on smaller speakers where there is a wider bandwidth of signal to be affected. (i.e. the frequency modulation of a higher frequency with a lower frequency modulator requires that the higher frequency is present for the effect to occur) - if this was a real issue then elliptical and coaxial speakers would suffer far more noticeably than any single circular speaker (regardless of diameter) and it would not have been a "hidden effect" for quite as long as it has. I suspect the effect of doppler distortion is minimal compared to more noticeable effects such as phase distortion (which from a technical stand point looks identical on an oscilloscope).

 

There is little doubt that the effect exists (a Leslie speaker is an exaggerated form of this ), but whether it is audible or even present in a single cone speaker is a whole different question, certainly if we could have created the Leslie-effect just by modulating the audio signal with a subsonic tone in any speaker then the design of a Lesie speaker would be a whole lot simpler.

 

A speaker is an electrical air pump.

 

The game is to move a volume of air, (technically called volume dispacement), over a band of frequencies. A speaker acheives this in two ways - by the diameter of the cone and by the distance it travels (throw). Coil size has a minor effect on frequency response, it is simply an electric motor, but general rule of thumb is the larger the area of the cone the bigger the column of air you are trying to move so the bigger motor required to move it - the distance a coil travels determines the throw of a speaker regardless of the cone diameter.

 

There is a lot of maths behind this, especially concerning passive radiators and stacked arrays, but for the purposes of this post I'll stick with simple single speaker physics.

 

For low frequencies using traditional materials (paper and cloth) the larger the diameter of the cone the easier it is to move that volume of air for an given coil displacement so the less travel was needed in the voice-coil. It was simpler to make big cones than it was to make long-throw voice coils, it also simplified the mounting of the cone (ie cone surround and voice-coil spider). The problem there is the stiffness of the cone (or lack there of) affects how the dispacement of the voice-coil translates into a displacement of air, if the cone flexes the movement is not proportional and larger diameter cones flex more than smaller ones. Modern materials (for mounts, cones, spiders, and voice-coil magents) have aleviated some of these problems enabling smaller speaker diameters to be a viable option.

 

Another thing that needs to be considered is the listening space. As some may know the speaker cabinet volume is a critical factor inthe design of a speaker system. The effect of the volume of air behind the speaker is two fold - firstly it prevents sound eminating from the back of the cone cancelling out or enhancing the sound from the front (the concept of the infinite baffle and ported reflex cabs) and secondly it provides a damping factor for unwanted flexing of the cone (ie the distortion inherrant in the speaker), which is related to the natural resonant frequency of the speaker itself. This last point can be flipped around to the volume of enclosed air in front of the speaker too - the room volume also has a damping effect on the speaker. Therefore it is just as important to select the size of speaker for the room you are using it in as it is to select the cabinet to put it in. A large diameter woofer in a small room is the same as trying to mount a big speaker in a small cab - very inefficient and detrimental to the frequency response.

 

 

 

 

If you do away with the cone and replace it with a fixed parabolic horn, the compression driver (which is effectively a speaker coil without the cone) can be very small - the down-side is the horn has to be very (very) big.

You can get a good stereo speaker sound without subwoofer, but it depends what you'd like to use it for. For home theater, you'd probably want one if you'd like to get the full immersive experience. Subwoofers will give you good frequency response down to 20 Hz without much rolloff, which you can't really hear but you'll feel and it will give the sound a lot of rumble and oomph. if you want to listen to music a sub isn't necessary but may be helpful. I listen to and record music through Yamaha HS80M speakers, which for two is about $500-600. You can expect to a have a sub-par listening experience on speakers that are less than $300 for a pair. Once you hear what higher quality speakers do, you won't want to go back.

 

Bose.

 

Keep it to yourself.