Speaker Asylum

RE: why do manufacturers opt for multiple small woofers rahter than fewer bigger woofers in speakers?

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In Reply to: RE: why do manufacturers opt for multiple small woofers rahter than fewer bigger woofers in speakers? posted by adkins on May 03, 2008 at 09:50:32

Let's say you're a manufacturer and want to offer a product line of 4 models.

OPTION A
You could start with a small monitor with a 4 in woofer, a larger monitor with a 6 in woofer, a small tower with a 8 in woofer and a large tower with a 10 in driver. The result is a product line with incremental bass performance and you will need to stock 4 different sizes of woofers and 4 different kinds of Xovers. If you do a good engineering job, you'll need to use 4 different tweeter types (or add a dedicated mid on the two larger models), increasing cash outlay.

OPTION B
You start with a small monitor with a 5 in. woofer, a larger monitor with two woofers, a small tower with 3 woofers and a large one with 4 woofers. The result is a product line with incremental bass performance. Your product line now uses only one driver and you benefit from MAJOR scale economies. Instead of having 4 different Xover designs, you can go away with only two. Chances are, the Xover frequency from bass (or mid bass) to tweeter will be the same and chances are you can also use only one efficient tweeter type for the whole line up.

MOST mid or HiFi manufacturers go with OPTION B, because perceived value is easy to assess (4 woofers cost more than 1 woofer). Smaller woofers makes enclosures smaller and more WAF friendly. Small boxes cost less to ship. The "house" sound is much easier to maintain with a multiple of the same drivers.

Whether small woofers sound better than large one is a non-issue. My preference goes for large woofers (12 or 15 in pro paper cones in large boxes) because of efficiency, dynamics, smoothness, ultra low distortion. But I could also live without regret with a pair of nice mini-monitors.

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