In Reply to: Increases in speaker bandwidth and sensitivity posted by Frihed89 on August 7, 2012 at 10:09:56:
Subjectively a wider bandwidth speaker will sound louder playing abroad band signal like music at the same power as a narrower one. How we hear loudness is not the same as how we measure it.
Each time you raise he sensitivity by 3dB, you have increased the loudness produce with a fixed power. If you increase it 10dB, you have had an effect similar to making your amp 10X more powerful.
What makes all this more difficult is that when we use a sound level meter or make a judgment about loudness, we are dealing with a short term average level and we don’t hear peaks as the loudness.
Music may require short term peaks 10, 100 or even 1000 times the average level in order to reproduce the dynamic components so very often a high sensitivity speaker will sound more dynamic than a low efficiency speaker.
We can’t hear very short clipping as a flaw but it does take away from the dynamics (when present).
The loudness wars are a way to get more average level out of a power / loudness limited system, the peaks are squashed, the average level increased and the quiet parts made much louder.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Increases in speaker bandwidth and sensitivity - tomservo 13:19:53 08/07/12 (0)