Eli5 how exactly speakers recreate let’s say a human voice. I’m not talking about analog or digital conversion, i know a bit about those subjects. But the physical act of a speaker cone moving back and forth, perfectly recreating a human voice or any other kind of recording seems like magic to me

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Eli5 how exactly speakers recreate let’s say a human voice. I’m not talking about analog or digital conversion, i know a bit about those subjects. But the physical act of a speaker cone moving back and forth, perfectly recreating a human voice or any other kind of recording seems like magic to me

In: Physics

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

To answer your question – first we need to understand what is sound. Sound is nothing but a wave (of energy) which propogates through air (and other objects but lets ignore them for a while). Something like – compressed and rarified air (along the direction of its travel).

Now if you have a ‘membrane’ (which is nothing but the cone of the speaker) that vibrates to and fro – it can create the same compressions and rarefications in air (in front of it). So when the membrane moves ahead it compresses the air and when it moves back – it rarefies it. The movement of the membrane is determined by electrical signals (which are in turn determined by some internal logic which determines how fast / how deep the membrane needs to move for specific sounds).

Again all sizes / types of membranes are not equally effective for producing all types of sound (deep or high). So you have large membranes (bass speakers) which create bass sounds (low frequency) very effectively and small membranes (tweeters) which create high frequencies better. Thats because its easier to make the small membrane vibrate at higher frequencies as compared to the larger membranes (without creating any unwanted distortions).

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I offer you a counterpoint, is the human body creating sound any less amazing?