Usually when you have a smaller speaker, you sacrifice the low end, but earbuds seem to manage to deliver substantial bass nonetheless. I assume the proximity to the eardrum helps, but I don’t fully understand how.
In: 2000
All the others comments are great…but it’s probably useful to remember… If you have a large wall of powerful Sub Woofers in front of you, and you turn your headphones up all the way, you will be able to tell when the sub wall is turned on. It will shake much more than just your inner ear. We don’t just use our ears for sensing vibration.
Having said this, it is impressive how much we can simulate bass, especially with sealed in-ear earphones. It’s clear there is a difference in that RAW POWER sense of a 20kW wall of low frequency BASS! and an earphone.
Size of the driver matters not in absolute but in relation to the size of the room it’s confined in.
They don’t. The tinier the space that the soundwaves have to fill, the bigger they seem to our ears.
relative to the ear canal theyre filling some have huge or multiple drivers inside, some even have planar magnetic drivers at nearly 15mm like the Letshouer S12 or 7Hz Timeless which go even further into the low and high end of the frequency range providing full sub-bass like you get from much larger headphones
others achieve it by having multiple “drivers” or essentially speakers in the shell for different frequency ranges eg like you have on a pair of floor standing speakers this can be a mixture of Balanced Armature (AKA BA generally better for mids/highs) or dynamic (speakers as you know them if you will but tiny ones, like the ones in a pair of floorstanders by design, good at low end)
some also manage to use a single driver to excellent effect too, even BA but theyre not the ideal for bass and sub-bass it depends on the design and quality
Off topic – tinnitus and hyperacusis suck royaly!! Please consider other, less invasive methods of listening to music, such as with over-the-ear headphones 🎧. Hearing doesn’t come back, and the inability to appreciate silence is irreversible!
It also helps not to think of low frequencies as big and high frequencies as small. It’s all just vibrations at different speeds moving through the air *over time.*
Because they are so close to your ear, they don’t need to do it at nearly the same volume as a 15, 12 or even 10” speaker would in a room. (The driver excursion or back and forth movement is much, much smaller)
With an earphone driver so close, the driver moves an almost imperceptible amount so it can cleanly produce sounds without falling apart. Even so, you can hear there is comparatively less bass to be heard compared to over the ear headphones. If that makes sense to you, I’ll elaborate on the magnets and how the kind of magnet influence the sound and efficiency.
Size of the speaker determines volume. The actual bass itself is determined by the frequency, larger speakers can have larger volume. Since the earbuds are right next to your ears, the tiny speakers can deliver low frequency (bass) audio waves through the small volume of air in the ear canal to your eardrums. Just like a large speaker can deliver low frequency audio across a room, or 3 city blocks down the street if you have enough subwoofers with enough power to do so
By the nature of their small design, earbuds do not have subwoofers to push large amounts of bass frequencies. Rather, they sound bassy due to their proximity to the ear, the enclosure they make with the ear, and via the natural resonances of bone conduction.
Resonant frequency depends on mass of the driver (as you imply), but it also depends on stiffness. So there are not one but two ways of tailoring the bass. A tiny headphone can reach low frequencies as long as it is loose enough.
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