How Speaker Works:

In every sound system, the highest quality depends on the speakers. The best recording, encoded on the most powerful storage device and played by the top-of-the-line deck and amplifier, is going to sound bad if the machine is hooked up to weak speakers.

The machine speaker is a component that takes the electronic signal stored on items like CDs, tapes, and DVDs and converts it back into the real sound that we can hear.

-In this post, we’re going to find out exactly how speakers are doing this. We will also look at the variations in speaker designs to see how these variations impact sound quality. Speakers are great pieces of technology that have had a tremendous influence on our society. But they are surprisingly simple machines in their cores.

The object creates a sound as it vibrates through the air (sound can also travel through liquids and solids, but air is the medium of transmission as we listen to speakers). If something vibrates, the air particles shift around it. Such air particles, in effect, transfer the air particles around them, bringing the pulse of vibration through the air as a moving disturbance.

Sound Basics:

To see how this works, let’s look at a basic vibrating object — a bell. If you ring a bell, the metal vibrates — flexes in and out — quickly. When it flexes out on one side, it forces out the air particles on that side.

These air particles collide with the particles in front of them, which collide with the particles in front of them, and so on. When the bell flexes forward, it draws in on those surrounding air particles, causing a drop in the pressure that draws in some of the surrounding air particles, causing another drop in the pressure that pulls out of the particles and so on. This decrease in pressure is called rarefaction.

Differentiation of sounds:

In this way, a vibrating body sends a wave of energy into the atmosphere. When the fluctuation wave hits your ear, it vibrates your ear back and forth. This motion is perceived by our brain as sound.

We detect different sounds from various vibrating structures due to changes in:

Sound-wave frequency-Higher wave frequency essentially means that the air pressure fluctuates faster. That is what we hear as a higher pitch. When there are fewer variations over time, the pitch is lower.

Air-pressure level-This is the amplitude of the wave, which defines how loud the sound is. Sound waves with higher amplitudes shift our eardrums further, and this feeling is registered as a higher volume.

A handsfree is working like our ears. It has a diaphragm that vibrates through the sound waves in the region. The signal from a microphone is recorded as an electrical signal on tape or CD. When you play this signal back on your stereo, the amplifier sends it back to the mic, which re-interprets it into physical vibrations. Good speakers are designed to create extremely accurate variations in air pressure, much like the ones that were initially picked up by the microphone. In the next segment, we’ll see how the speaker does it.

DRIVER TYPES:

In the last segment, we saw that conventional speakers produced sound by pushing and pulling an electromagnet attached to a flexible cone. While all drivers are based on the same principle, there is a wide range of driver sizes and power. The main driver types are:

Woofers
Tweeters
Midrange

Good Woofers are the largest drivers and are designed to produce low-frequency sound. Tweeters are a lot of smaller modules, designed to achieve the highest frequencies. Midrange speakers display a range of frequencies in the middle of the sound spectrum.

So if you think about it, it makes total sense. To produce higher frequency waves — wells in which high pressure and low-pressure points are near together — the driver’s diaphragm must vibrate more rapidly. This is more difficult to do with a large cone because of the density of the cone. Conversely, it’s harder for a tiny driver to vibrate slowly enough to create very low-frequency sounds. It’s more suited for rapid movement.

To produce quality sound over a wide frequency range more effectively, you can break the entire range into smaller chunks that are handled by specialized drivers. Some best companies in Pakistan sell Quality loudspeakers that typically have a woofer, a tweeter, and sometimes a midrange driver, all included in one enclosure.

Of course, to dedicate each driver to a particular frequency range, the speaker system first needs to break the audio signal into different pieces — low frequency, high frequency, and sometimes mid-range frequencies. This is the job of the speaker crossover.

The most popular form of crossover is passive, which means it does not require an external power source because it is triggered by an audio signal passing through it. This type of crossover uses inductors, capacitors, and often other circuit components. Under such circumstances, trainers and inductors can only become effective conductors.

The crossover capacitor will conduct the current very well when the frequency reaches a certain level but will perform poorly when the frequency is below that level. The crossover inductor works in the opposite way — it is not a good conductor when the frequency is below a certain point.

Passive crossover ranges are defined by the individual circuit components — to adjust them, you need to add new capacitors and inductors. Active crossovers are not as commonly used as passive crossovers, however, because the equipment is much more costly and you need multiple amplifier outputs for your speakers.

Producing Sound:

In the last section, we saw that sound moves through waves of air pressure fluctuation and that we hear sounds differently depending on the frequency and amplitude of these waves. We also discovered that microphones convert sound waves into electrical signals that can be transmitted to CDs, tapes, LPs, etc. Players transform this processed information back to electrical current for use in the stereo network.

The speaker is actually the final translation machine — the opposite of the microphone. It takes the electrical signal and transforms it back into actual vibrations to produce sound waves.

Written by: Nimra Siddiqui