View Single Post
Old 16th Jun 2016, 9:17 pm   #35
Radio Wrangler
Moderator
 
Radio Wrangler's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Fife, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 22,801
Default Re: Starting My Journey

In choosing loudspeakers, take a good look at your room. Where will they go? What size can you get away with?

A larger loudspeaker starts with a considerable advantage over a small one. Whatever technology is thrown at a small one, the same can be applied to the larger one and the results can be made even better.

I'm somewhat amused by people using small speakers stood on tall stands with a lot of wasted space under the speakers. The designer would have killed to have been able to use that space productively.

If you can, go for something unfashionably big and floor standing.

I'm not saying that any big speaker has to be better than any small one, but it gives a good designer freedoms that he can never have in a small volume. The designers who understand this and know how to use it are the ones to find.

Often, to create the impression in the ear of the listener of deep bass, small units are designed to have a bump which sort of compensates for the whole thing not going low enough in frequency. The illusion sort of works on 'thud' noises like drums, but it really falls apart on bass sounds which have tuned pitch like bass guitar notes, pedal notes from pipe organs, double basses etc.

In order to reproduce a certain frequency of note at a certain sound pressure level, the volume of air which needs to be shifted each cycle can be calculated. No whizzy new materials have changed this. No amount of money can change this. Progress has made it feasible to shift a larger proportion of the volume of the cabinet, but boy does it help if you start with a large cabinet. It's like sticking a turbocharger on a small engine to get the power of a larger engine... but who said you couldn't turbocharge the larger one?

There is no substitute for cubic inches as they say.

Besides, unfashionable largeness has a very nice effect on price.

David
__________________
Can't afford the volcanic island yet, but the plans for my monorail and the goons' uniforms are done
Radio Wrangler is offline