|
Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
|
|
|
Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
|
In Reply to: Audiophysic Yara posted by AudioSoul on November 19, 2007 at 16:42:05:
The area of a circle is pi times the square of the radius. If you double the radius, and doubling the cone size from 5" to 10" roughly doubles the radius, then area will increase to 4 times the original area, not 2 times. To double the area, the square of the radius has to double. That occurs when the radius is increased to roughly 1.41 times its original size so a 7" driver has roughly twice the surface area of a 5" driver. In real life terms you're probably talking a 6.5" driver because driver measurements are often inflated to include the surround as well as the cone area.
What size woofer do you need for better bass? Bad question since better bass could mean a number of things including lower extension and/or higher SPLs and in part both also depend on the ability of your amp to drive your speakers. You may very well get better bass by simply changing your amp rather than your speakers. On the other hand you could change your speakers to something with a greater driver area and get higher SPLs and better transient response but not gain anything at all in frequency extension. There are speakers around with 15" bass drivers that are rolling off noticeably at 40 Hz and other speakers with much smaller drivers, even 6.5" drivers that will deliver lower extension but struggle to deliver the SPLs with the same ease as the speaker with the larger driver. Your room and its low frequency response will also play a part in determining what kind of bass results you get.
You comment that your speakers have transmission line loading. That, like the port in a bass reflex speaker, enables the speaker's bass response to extend a little lower than it would if it were used in a sealed box, so there's the other variable: type of enclosure.
Instead of trying to judge things by driver size, take a look at frequency response, especially what the -3 dB point is in the bass range, and what the speaker's sensitivity is. If you're keeping your existing amp, whatever that is, you want a speaker with a suitable combination of low end extension (ie a low -3 dB point) and high sensitivity that will allow you to hear the lowest notes of the music you like at reasonable levels. If your amp is small to medium in power, you will also want a speaker that presents an easy load to the amp, ie one with no major drops in impedance or high phase angles in the low frequency range. Then, of course, there's budget to consider.
Bigger drivers certainly have advantages but they may not be the answer to your particular problem and not all speakers with large bass drivers have the same level of bass response. You may actually get better bass response in a speaker with a smaller bass driver than another speaker, but there will also be a price to pay for that comparatively better response and, apart from the obvious $ cost, there's usually a cost in speaker sensitivity. Smaller speakers tend to need bigger amps if they are going to provide good bass response, at least as far as extension goes. Even if a bigger driver doesn't give you the extension, what it will tend to provide is a greater sense of effortlessness in the bass region.
It's not too hard to get good extension and it's not too hard to get that sense of effortlessness, but it is a lot harder to get both together so make sure you know just what it is you want when you say "better bass".
David Aiken
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Follow Ups
- RE: Audiophysic Yara - David Aiken 22:34:32 11/19/07 (0)
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
