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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Does magnet size matter? posted by Raymond Leggs on June 1, 2012 at 20:38:09:
Sort of. Magnet size and strength are variables in speaker motor design but are no more or less important than voice coil design, gap dimensions, moving mass and mechanical properties of the suspension components and other metrics. Speaker motor design is truly a physics/engineering effort and often calls upon FEA (Finite Element Analysis) techniques to do correctly.
In any case, don't look at magnet size only but consider driver frequency response, distortion curves, polar response curvers, BL curves, power handling and excursion capabilities and other performance related metrics. Magnet size alone is not proof positive of superior quality or superior design. That said, larger motors cost more and typically designers don't put expensive components into shoddy designs. But there are some designs out there that boast large magnet size and not much more while some drivers with smaller magnets perform really well.
Just remember:
The best magnets do not ensure good motor design.
The best motor design does not ensure good speaker design.
The best speaker design does not mean you will personally like it.
Pick the speaker that sounds best of you and leave motor design considerations to the engineers and manufacturers.
Just a case in point, this driver:
http://www.madisound.com/pdf/vifa/mg10md09-08e.pdf
This (sadly discontinued) driver has a very small magnet yet is one of the flattest midrange speakers ever made. It's not good for very low frequencies, is not very efficient and can't handle loads of power, but with it's small magnet and small 3/4" voice coil and small fiberglass cone with special dust cap, this driver can be mated with practically any tweeter in existence, even those with higher resonant frequencies into the 1.5 - 2k range. I use four of these mids with "wee magnets" in a WMTMW design and they work really well, but within the above limitations. I truncated the frames and use "rectangle flange" tweeters for an absolute minimum center-of-tweeter to center-of-mid vertical distance, which needs to be even smaller as mid-to-tweeter crossover point goes up to avoid comb filtering.
Just remember that in the end nothing matters more than you being happy with the speaker. Not even "good measurements". Few people like a cheap, crappy, shrill and distorted sounding speaker. Most people generally like a speaker that is reasonably flat and low distortion that images well and give a sense of "realness" and palpability to the sound. But speakers meeting these criterion can have very different design philosophies and overall sound character and imaging.
Cheers,
Presto
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Follow Ups
- In a word... - Presto 10:46:24 06/05/12 (0)
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