How are headphones with single drivers able to make sounds that are “multiple sounds at the same time?´´

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So from what I know, the drivers vibrate at a given wavelength and that makes a sound. That makes sense to me of how you can create voice for example. But how does multiple instruments + voice in one driver work? You hear all them seperately but at the same time?

To me this sounds like a monitor pixel making more than 1 pixel at once.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I’ve explained this one before a few times, e.g. [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o2kwbj/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/h274zz6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2). But the really short version is that headphones are just trying to make your eardrums vibrate in a certain way to make you experience things as if you were listening to the actual thing.

You’ve only got one eardrum per ear, so you only need one driver per ear!

The clever part isn’t done by your headphones, but by your brain.

You can add multiple pitches together to make a more complicated wave. We can use maths to split these different pitches back out, but mechanisms in our ears actually do that physically, meaning each different pitch gets sent along a different nerve bundle from our ears to our brains. Our brains then add things together based off patterns we know, and figure out what all the different sounds are meant to be.

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