Basic question about sound.

Posted by Rakesh Malik [IP: 204.176.12.196] on May 21, 1999 at 10:08:21
Using Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt):

In Reply to: Basic question about sound. posted by Brad Broten on May 20, 1999 at 17:58:49:

There is another issue, actually; when you increase the power to the speaker, you are causing the driver diaphragms to move farther. That leads to some serious non-linearities, particularly when they reach their peak displacement (Xmax). The result there is just distortion; as the voice coil moves farther out of the magnet system, it give the amplifier less control over the driver itself.

When you have 2 speakers in series, they each get half the power and hence have a proportionally smaller displacement (I don't think that it is actually a linear relationship, but I'm really not sure) and one result of that is less distortion.

That's one of the reasons behind the D'Appolito design (2 midbass drivers flanking a tweeter) and dual-driver subwoofers. They can move the same amount of air as a single driver with 2x the Xmax that way, leading to lower distortion. There, of course, disadvantages to this (like interference patterns and such) but that's inevitable (this is, after all, reality we're dealing with :).

-Rakesh

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