I’m an audiophile and home theatre enthusiast. I keep hearing the term “passive radiator” and when I google it everything just goes over my head. Can someone explain like I’m 5?
In: Technology
It’s a mechanism to use the “backstroke” of a speaker to produce more sound.
In a sealed box or an infinite baffle you’re just isolating the two sides of the speaker to prevent the backwave from canceling what the front of the speaker is doing.
In a ported box, you use a column of air pushed by the backwave to reinforce certain bands of the sound produced by the front.
A passive radiator works similarly to a port except instead of pushing the column of air in the port, you’re pushing an unpowered speaker.
So the passive radiator is passive in that it is not powered by an amplifier, it has no motor structure, but it responds to the pressure created by the backwave of the powered speaker to reinforce a certain range of frequencies.
With ports you tune which frequencies are reinforced by changing the size of the air column, ie the volume of the port.
With a passive radiator you tune it by altering the mass of the radiator, they generally have a stud for attaching weights.
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