Acoustics Are Weird

When you place speakers, remember that sound bounces off hard surfaces and tends to be absorbed by softer surfaces. That’s why the new apartment you moved into sounded so echoey before you moved your furniture and clothing into the space, and then everything sounded normal afterward. So keep that in mind when you place speakers. Some redecorating may help if there are few soft furnishings in the room, such as adding curtains and a rug.

Don’t Block the Sound

Sometimes, the room you want the speakers in isn’t very open. You may have half walls, bookcases sticking out, large armchairs placed in between the speaker location and where you’re sitting, and so on. Do what you can to place the speakers so that the sound is blocked by as few obstacles as possible. Everything in front of the speakers can prevent more sound from traveling farther in the room. And while it might not seem like much sound has been blocked, it can be enough to make the quality of the sound seem less like what you wanted to hear. Try moving furniture, too, if you just can’t find a spot where audio from the speakers will have a clear path into the rest of the room.

Angle In

Speakers should be angled in toward the listening area. If you’ve got someone sitting in a chair with the speakers in front and slightly off to the person’s sides, those speakers shouldn’t be placed with their faces perpendicular to the wall; they should be angled in so that the sound is directed toward where the listener is sitting. If you’ve got speakers in a ring around a room, those in the corners need to be placed diagonally so that their sound is directed toward the center of the room. If the speakers are going to be up high, angle them downward as well.

There Will Always Be Something

Speaker placement is rarely going to be perfect. It may be perfect in spots, but there will likely be areas where it isn’t the best. You do what you can to reduce the number of those spots, but don’t worry if the placement isn’t exactly perfect for every spot in the room.

Be Nice to the Neighbors

One placement mistake that people often make is attaching or positioning the speakers right against an interior wall. If you live in a townhome, condo, apartment, or other attached housing, or even if you’re thinking of placing the speakers on a wall that separates one room from another in your own place, be aware that the sound can travel through the wall much more easily when the speaker is touching it.

Sound travels in waves, mainly through air but also through wall and furniture material. Those walls and pieces of furniture can break up or reduce some sound waves, which is why sound on the other side of a wall is often muffled. But if you place the speaker that’s emitting the sound right up against the wall, then the sound waves coming out of the speaker are much stronger at the point when they meet the wall. It’s easier for those waves to make it through the wall and be audible on the other side.

So when arranging your speakers, don’t shove them right up against the wall. Leave some space so that the waves coming out of the speaker don’t hit the wall right away. That will hopefully prevent any sound form getting through and reduce what your neighbors might hear. Also, don’t place the speakers right near an open window. That sounds obvious, but some people forget how loud the speakers may sound outside.

If you need a speaker repair kit, a recone kit, or just want to find out more about speaker placement, contact The Speaker Exchange. Your speakers are a critical part of your audio system, and if you don’t place them appropriately and don’t care for them, they could soon make your music and other audio sound less than optimal. Keep your speakers in good shape so that what you want to hear, is what you hear.

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Now that one cone is done you can use that cone as a template for the remaining cones and cut from that marking.

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For high frequencies, a variation on the common dynamic loudspeaker design uses a small dome as the moving part instead of an inverted cone. This design is typically used for tweeters and sometimes for mid-range speakers. Because the wavelength of high-frequency sound is short (approximately 15 mm at 20 kHz), tweeters must have a physically small moving component or they will create a “beam” of sound rather than sending sound omnidirectionally (as is usually desired). Perhaps contrary to intuition, making the moving component in the form of a dome rather than an inverted cone does not help to direct sound evenly in all directions. The dome is used because it is an easily manufactured stiff structure – as anyone who has attempted to crush an egg the long way can attest to. The stiffness moves self resonances upward in frequency.

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• Piezoelectric transducers have no voice-coil, therefore there is no electrical inductance to overcome; it is easy to couple high-frequency electrical energy into the piezoelectric transducer, especially under the low-power, non-critical applications in which they are usually employed.
• Piezoelectric transducers are physically small yet powerful, leading to good dispersion, although the fidelity of such devices remains in question when it comes to critical listening.
• Piezoelectric transducers are resistant to overloads that would normally burn out the voice coil of a conventional loudspeaker.
• Because piezos comprise a capacitive load, they usually do not require an external cross-over network; they can simply be placed in parallel with the inductive woofer/midrange loudspeaker(s).
• We stock a variety of different Piezoelectric components: the most popular square MP1005 tweeter, MP1165 Powerline square tweeter, MP1165HP higher power version, MP1016 2×5 horn,  MP1176 3×7 horn, MP1188 screw on driver, Piezo Bullet Driver and more not listed here or on our site. Plus like with any component, if we do not stock it, we can order it for you.

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There are two problems with this design which led to its being abandoned as hopelessly impractical, however; firstly, a quick calculation shows that for a reasonable number of bits required for reasonable sound reproduction quality, the size of the system becomes very large. For example, a 16 bit system to be compatible with the 16 bit audio CD standard, starting with a reasonable 2 square inch driver for the least significant bit, would require a total area for the drivers of over 900 square feet. Secondly, since this system is converting digital signal to analog, the effect of aliasing is unavoidable, so that the audio output is “reflected” at equal amplitude in the frequency domain, on the other side of the sampling frequency. Even accounting for the vastly lower efficiency of speaker drivers at such high frequencies, the result was to generate an unacceptably high level of ultrasonics accompanying the desired output. In electronic digital to analog conversion, this is addressed by the use of Low-pass filters to eliminate the spurious upper frequencies produced; however, this approach cannot be used to solve the problem with this digital loudspeaker, since it is the last link in the audio chain.

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There are some criticisms of this approach. Anyone or anything that disrupts the path of the beam will disturb the dispersion of the signal, and there are limitations, both to the frequency response and to the dispersion pattern of such devices.

This technology was originally developed by the US (and Russian) Navy for underwater sonar in the mid-1960s, and was briefly investigated by Japanese researchers in the early 1980s, but these efforts were abandoned due to extremely poor sound quality (high distortion) and substantial system cost. These problems went unsolved until a paper published by Dr. F. Joseph Pompei of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 (105th AES Conv, Preprint 4853, 1998) fully described a working device that reduced audible distortion essentially to that of a traditional loudspeaker.

The technology, termed the Audio Spotlight, was first made commercially available in 2000 by Holosonics, a company founded by Dr. Pompei. There are currently two devices available on the market that use ultrasound to create an audible “beam” of sound: the Audio Spotlight and Hypersonic Sound

horn speaker is a speaker that uses a horn to get more sound (volume) from the driving loudspeaker. The horn itself does not amplify anything, but rather improves the coupling between the speaker driver (typically made of paper or, more recently, more exotic materials such as titanium) and the air (which has a very low density). Simply put, air is very light and speaker cones are relatively very heavy, so horns trick the speaker cone into believing it is very large in surface area, and very light (more like air).

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What’s really going on with woofers, and what are the important factors in how they perform as well as how they impact the performance of loudspeaker systems

(Editor’s Note: Eminence Speaker LLC also contributed to this report.)

Cone drivers (also referred to as woofers and transducers in this article) are not overly complex. When an electrical current passes through a wire coil (the voice coil) in a magnetic field, it produces a force that varies with the current applied.

The cone, connected to the voice coil, moves in and out, creating waves of high and low air pressure. The coil and magnet assembly are the “motor structure” of the loudspeaker.

The movement is controlled by the loudspeaker’s suspension, which comprises the cone surround and the “spider”.

The surround and spider allow the coil to move freely along the axis of the magnet’s core (or “pole”) without touching the sides of the magnetic gap.

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The coil and magnet assembly are the ‘motor structure’ of the loudspeaker. The movement is controlled by the loudspeaker’s suspension which comprises the cone surround and the ‘spider’. The surround and spider allow the coil to move freely along the axis of the magnet’s core (or ‘pole’) without touching the sides of the magnetic gap.

Eminence technology and proprietary materials mean that age-old ‘compromises’ of durability against sensitivity, or power handling against precision of response, are more easily solved than you might imagine.

Heatsinks: In the quest for higher power density (more power and hence more sound from less space),
Eminence has progressively introduced heatsink components to selected transducers e.g. cast frame neodymium products and Kilomax. The heatsinks pass through the pole of the transducer or are incorporated into the chassis of the loudspeaker to transfer heat away from the coil. The air currents caused by the cone movement cool the heatsink.

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