Loudspeakers

The challenge of writing this blog is that I want it to be educational, but not overly technical so that everyone reading it either falls asleep or gives up!
I recently found this great video on YouTube that may help to illustrate my point:

It is my hope that I can provide enough information to increase your understanding, without trying to turn you into a complete freak of nature a bit like the guy in the video, and well me!

So now, on to what I really want to write about! I’ve been doing a lot of refreshing and reading through stuff on loudspeakers again, just because I’m weird like that… my light reading before going to bed can sometimes be a quick look at Thiele Small parameters and equations for arriving at a maximally flat frequency response for a given driver in a ported/bass reflex enclosure.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with those details, but I would like to talk about loudspeakers in general for a bit.

A loudspeaker does the opposite job of a microphone, it converts electrical energy to acoustic energy. In other words it makes sound!
Technically speaking a loudspeaker is a combination of several ‘drivers’. There are 2 main types of ‘drivers’.

The Cone driver.
Mainly used for lower-mid and low frequencies, also known as a woofer, or sub-woofer.

The Horn Compression driver.
Mainly used for upper-mid and high frequencies, sometimes called a tweeter.

So for example, the Wharfedale EVP-X12M monitors that we use have a woofer, and a horn.

A single driver will not be very efficient at reproducing every frequency contained in music, so the frequencies are split between 2 or more drivers to increase the overall efficiency of the loudspeaker.

There are 2 ways to do this:

Passive crossover

Active crossover (Bi-Amp)

The Bi-amp method is much more efficient, and is preferred, especially for higher quality and higher power systems. Out of interest, the Wharfedale monitor has a single amplifier, and a passive crossover.

Specifications

Whenever you buy a loudspeaker, it is a good idea to check out the specs to help you decide if it will suit the task that you need it for. Here is a link to some good in depth reading on the topic if you like

Let me know if you have any questions regarding Loudspeakers and i’ll respond ASAP!