In school, I made a speaker out of wood and made the sound bounce off the inner walls strengthening the sound, but its’ sound quality and loudness compared to its size, vs real ones is major. What exactly is going on inside the speaker?
Additionally, how is bass empowered?
(sorry if this is really obvious, I just don’t understand haha)
In: Technology
There’s nothing magical about a “real” speaker that separates it from your speaker. They produce sound the same way – by using electricity to move a magnet (the driver) which is attached to a rigid, thin cone or dome. (There are less common speaker types that work a little differently but they’re not widely used or that important). An electrical signal is sent that forces the magnet to move along the axis of the cone. Since the cone is attached to the magnet, the cone moves as well, and that’s what moves the air to make sound.
What makes different speakers sound different is not usually fundamentally different technology, but different materials and more sophisticated design. For example, what material is the cone made out of? The only point of the cone is to move the air in the way that the electrical signal dictates. So you want a cone that is very light and stiff, to be able to move quickly for higher frequency sounds, and not bend instead of pushing air. You also want to make sure that the cone doesn’t resonate a lot at a particular frequency, because if it does, that frequency will be added into whatever sound you’re trying to make. So there are various choice people make about what materials to use for the cone – cardboard/paper, or plastic, or metal, or a combination of materials.
Similarly, it’s important to use the right materials for the enclosure. The enclosure protects the speaker, and it’s also very important for the timbre (specific frequency response) of the speaker. Enclosures are designed to make sure they don’t have any resonances that are undesirable (just like the cone) and they have specific facets sometimes to improve how the sound is produced – like how subwoofers often have a hole (port) which allows more volume out of the same size of speaker.
So I guess the answer to your question is that audio engineers spent time and money thinking about the best way to get the performance they wanted out of the speaker for the price point. It’s not any fundamental difference, just more knowledge and care.
The three main variables are
* The driver
* The enclosure
* Electrical EQ
I don’t know the various parameters of the speaker. There’s an overall parameter of “at what frequency does the efficiency of the speaker start dropping off”
This would typically be stated as the frequency (in Hz) at which the sound is 3dB less than nominal.
The enclosure can be tuned to increase the level of some frequencies at the expense of reducing efficiency at others.
This can be used to allow the speaker to produce louder or lower bass.
A simple tuning is porting the box so that some of the pressure from the rear of the driver is allowed to be redirected to the exterior of the box.
EQ can be used to increase the level of some frequencies at the expense of using more power from the amplifier and to put the driver under more strain.
One way to make a speaker appear to be bassier than it really is would be to design it to make some bass frequencies louder than they should be. This “hypes up” the sound at the expense of accuracy.
There’s also a type of processing that distorts the bass so that our brain thinks that a lower note than is present is being played. Eg hardware that does processing Similar to [Waves MaxxBass](https://www.waves.com/plugins/maxxbass)
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