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You can only have decent sound with small speakers if you don't care about bass. Intentionally adding bass distortion to trick unsophisticated listeners into th
by mrob 3y ago
You can only have decent sound with small speakers if you don't care about bass. Intentionally adding bass distortion to trick unsophisticated listeners into thinking there's more bass than there really is won't fool anybody who's familiar with the real thing. As Hofmann's Iron Law of speaker design says: deep bass, small size, high efficiency -- pick at most two. And there's only so much you can compromise efficiency before you melt the voice coils.
- ta988 3y agoDon't you agree that at equal size speakers from the 2000 are worse than those from now? I don't say that they are equivalent to a good quality HiFi system, but things have gotten much better for cheap systems.
- mrob 3y agoTrue, but I don't really see the point. They're better than before, but the laws of physics dictate they'll never be good. If I can't use good speakers I'd rather use headphones. Sacrificing efficiency doesn't matter when the driver is so close to your ear it doesn't need to be loud.
- ta988 3y agoWhich laws of physics are you refering to? To my knowledge, there is no law that says that a tiny driver of arbitrary geometry (could be multiple tiny drivers) couldn't reproduce arbitrary pressure patterns in the audio frequency and intensity range.
- mrob 3y agoKLH audio hosts an article explaining Hofmann's Iron Law: https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-design-hofmans-iron-law-by-henry-kloss.pdf https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-... Also, even if efficiency was not a concern (maybe you don't pay for your own electricity and you somehow managed to build superconducting voice coils and speaker cables), getting arbitrarily high pressure from an arbitrarily small driver requires arbitrarily large excursion. If you somehow overcame all the mechanical complexities of this, you'll still run into the problem of finite speed of sound. The higher the excursion the faster the cone moves for the same frequency, and at some point it's going to go supersonic, which is certainly not good for distortion.
- ta988 3y agoThanks