Flat Speaker (signal not physical shape)

Posted by Shawn Harvey [IP: 206.31.111.18] on September 28, 1999 at 17:19:57
Using Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt):

In Reply to: Flat Speaker (signal not physical shape) posted by rabident on September 28, 1999 at 14:39:30:

When you look at a graph of frequency response you're probably looking at a sine wave sweep. This is only one of many ways to look at the response of a speaker -- like a snapshot. The designer must also take into consideration the impulse and step responses, damping/ringing, vertical and horizontal dispersion, lobing and interference, etc. Most trade off one for the other in design (since to date no one has figured out how to make a perfect speaker) until they get a good balance of what they expect/want the speaker to do. Because 3dB is not a huge amount ear-wise, most designers are comfortable with a +/- 3dB range on their sweeps if they accomplish some of the other things they need to make a speaker sound good.

Keep in mind also that there are many other effects going on, even in something simple like a sine sweep, such as diffraction, non-linear driver response, crossover network transfers, etc.

Ideally the frequency response would be flat, yes. Also ideally the step and impulse responses would look like the inputs, there would be no lobing or intereference problems, etc. I think this is what makes speaker building such a "black-art" even today, although great strides are being made in understanding how to correlate the graphs to what people actually hear.

Hope this helps. I'm learning as I go along with the designers.

Shawn Harvey

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