Speakers and effect etc.

Ok, when I look at the specifications for my speakers it lists a whole lot of things. Sinus power, music power etc. Lots of different numbers for effect. What is the difference between all of them?

We’ll need a little more detail, and a bit more accuracy, here. What sort of speakers are they: home stereo, guitar amp, studio monitors? And “sinus power” is almost certainly not was the specs say.

I’m guessing home stereo here. “Music power” is a guess as to how much the speaker can handle in an average music situation–if you crank up the bass, for instance, you’ll put more power through the woofer (and maybe blow it out) if you actually run the rated “music power” through the system.

I’m sure the specs on the speaker sticker does in fact say “sinus power”. You can get amps that refer to “sinus power” too. Here is a sticker from a Danish company that has “sinus power” on the specs.

I suspect it refers to the continuous average power output (which is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the “RMS power”). The “musical power” probably refers to the peak level output when you’ve got stuff playing, and the “sinus power” may be the output that you have in the “silent parts” (when your stereo is ON, but you’re in between songs on the CD and your speakers are outputting “silence”).

Sort of like, I would normally expect to see a power rating for a speaker written like: “75/120W (RMS/Peak)”

I’m guessing** your speakers are showing that same info as: “Sinus Power 75W, Musical Power 120W”

Again, that’s a WAG, but…

**I just e-mail a recording engineer in Hollywood to clarify “sinus power” – I don’t think it’s a term commonly used in North America (I don’t know why I think that, just a gut feeling). He is the mastering engineer at studios who engineered some “best engineered Grammy” winning albums. He’ll know what it means. I’ll report back.

I think you may be right Eats_Crayons but I think sinus is a translation or short for sinusoidal waveform.

I could be wrong if the value is given in boogers.

I agree, but as a speaker spec, that’s still pretty weird. Never seen “sine power” before.

The engineer guy hasn’t asnwered yet, must be at work. Last time Sniffs_Markers was at his studio Aeorsmith rang him up on the phone - so I take it he’s pretty busy and riff-rakk like me who e-mails him a goofy question, just is not a priority.
:smiley:

He’ll still answer though. In the meantime, I asked another engineer whose been remixing some stuff for us. He agreed with my hypothesis for the same reason - the context. He’s never heard it as “sinus power” either but thinks it’s a colloquialism.

a speaker is not a f*cking blender or a vacuum cleaner. a blender or a vacuum cleaner runs from a perfectly standardized power source - the outlet in your wall.

a speaker runs off of a signal that is totally unpredictable, you can destroy a speaker with 10 watts, or you could feed it 1000watt and not destroy it ( same speaker ). frequency and duration come into play here.

even with a multitude of specs like music power, peak power, you still do not really have a clear picture of when a speaker is going to give, there are too many variables.

a speaker can be blown in a number of different ways, but typically the power handling as specifid is going to be a measure of the power needed to burn the voice coil of the woofer. obviously with a constant signal like a sinewave it won’t take much power, but with a typical music signal that consists of short spikes and long periods with very low levels of power you could have pretty high spikes without burning out the coils that take some time to heat up.

peak power is irrelevant.

music power is going to be more or less the power of the amp that you could feed into the speakers and expect them to handle it given that the signal does not have clipping or very low bass frequencies.

very rarely you can see a specification for thermal sinewave power handling, usually you will only see it on very expensive professional drivers. that number is going to be lower than music power, and is probably the most useful because music is not a well-defined signal.

this is all very vague i know, so there are STANDARDS that are more specific, like the AES standard or DIN standard for measuring speaker power. i don’t know the details on those except that i think AES is amercian and DIN is german.

clipping distortion is the fastest way to blow the tweeters in your speaker. clipping distortion occurs when an amp is overdriven. this can destroy a speaker even if the amp is rated MUCH lower than the speaker. for that reason its a good idea to have an amp that has RMS power that is at least equal to the speaker’s music power, so the amp never actually is overdriven in operation.

if a speaker does not have tweeters then clipping is not a concern, but such a speaker is garbage, like what you find in stock car stereos from older cars.

Well, I suppose I’ll burn in hell for that one. Mea culpa, mea culpa. Thanks for the illumination! I’m guessing that “sinus” is a Danish word for “sine wave” but clearly my guesses here are not getting me much of anywhere. vasyachkin is correct, of course, that since music can be darn near anything, it’s difficult to determine what speakers are a match for what amp.

I’ll shut up now. Thank you for your patience.

GreyWanderer

The reason for all those figures is down to the way certain manufacturers try to mislead people into buying their products, and in this regard the Japanese electronics industry are the absolute worst of the lot.

There are many differant ways with which to measure the output of an amplifier, and as many ways to measure the capabilities of loudspeakers, by careful use of certain figures, greatly inflated claims can be made.
Although these claims are usually true, they are so misleading that in effect they are blatent lies.

The current most disgraceful misrepresentation of audio electronics must surely belong to computer speaker setups, particularly of the surround sound type.
You will see such speaker set ups quoted at 120Watts, and often much more, but the way this figure is arrived at is such bollocks that the numbers quoted are almost criminal.
That 120Watt surroundsound set would probably merit perhaps a 20Watt rating if measured in a more sober and less misleading manner.

Joe the mug punter thinks he know something about being ‘technical’ and the Japananese audio electronics maker will flatter him by using the headline figure of the wonderful ‘WATT’.

This is only one part of the picture, all those differant numbers on the back of your speakers is an attempt to quote their capability in a way that you can compare to all the other ways of quoting speaker qualities.

Perhaps I have a bee in my bonnet about the way those misleading and lying swine the Japanese audio manufacturers mislead and lie, but I remember when they quoted tiny little radios in milliWatts just to try con the public, thus a 2Watt radio magically became a 2000milliWatt radio, which sounds a whole lot more impressive. Another trend I have seen, especially with cheap headphoes, is to describe them as ‘digital’ WTF! this is just utter rubbish.

‘Music power’ is so subjective as to be meaningless, unless you have access to the exact manners of testing procdure and you are able to apply that exact same procedure to every other piece of equipment, you cannot make any meaningful comparison.

The Japanse electronics audio manufacturer will change their method of measurement just as soon as the purchasing public actually cotton on to what the quantities quoted mean, they have done it before and will do so again.

When you buy audio stuff, much of it is wrapped up in an electronic mythology so powerful that audiophiles mamage to con themselves because they do not have a complete enough understanding of electronic engineering and maths to understand the terms, and somethings then end up as secure little electronic homiles with only the slimmest basis upon reality.
You willl note that I have not properly answered your question, and this is because I would need access to the manufacturers data as to exactly how those numbers on the back of your louspeakers was obtained.

In general it is useful to start with RMS power, ‘sinus’ and also to look at the bandwidth of the loudspeakers.

Human hearing does not go much above 12kHz and what you want is a set of speakers whose output volume stays the same, for the same power input from the lowest note to the highest note.

Good quality loudspeakers will often come with a chart of exactly how they perform over their rated bandwidth, expensive ones will have an individual chart for each set of speakers rather than one cahrt for the whole production run.

The good old Japanese manufacturers will quote a bandwidthe of perhaps 40kHz or even more, with a variation in sound level of perhaps 3dBs.
As you are now becoming aware, this is so misleading as to be a lie, because a 3dB variation in sound is actually twice the volume and your hearing does not go anywhere near the upper figure quoted, had the figure been quoted for the human hearing range it is likely things would not be quite so good.

Next you need to think about the kind of music you will play, because differant types of music put more power through differant parts of the frequency range.
Orchestral music will not have anything like as much power in the higher frequency range as say thrash metal rock.

Speakers with several elements will be constructed with this in mind so that there is less danger of you blowing say the tweeter because of your Aerosmith tendencies.

If you would quote the whole of the legend on the back of your speakers perhaps I can give some guidance.

Usually ‘music power’ means the maximum instantaneous power(such as when a huge symbol crashes) that your system can develop.
‘Total music power’ usually means the same thing, but with the output of both speakers added together - it just makes for a more impressive number.

The maximum instantaneous power is always very much more that the system can handle continuously, up to four or five times more (remember those computor surroundsound speakers’?)

Some manufacturers(surprisingly its usually the Japanese ones) will quote ‘total music power’ without regard to the quality of the sound emeanting from the speakers at the time of maximum instantaneous power, so that althought the sound is loud, it is also grossly distorted and terrible, and what its more it could irreversibly damage the loudspeaker cones.

Ah, this is what a (not the Hollywood, but a highly regarded Aussie) recording engineer said about the “sine” part of it all.

First he went like this… :rolleyes:

Then he said: Using an example of a speaker says “Sinus power: 250W”.

So I guess my initial hunch was right. “Sinus Power/Music Power” is a more meaningless way to suggest (RMS/peak) to make it sound cooler than it is… and not really telling you anything particularly useful at all.

Then he added with another :rolleyes: – and confirming casdave’s opinion:

Listen to casdave he knows his stuff.

Home electronics are quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. (We got a stereo for my father-in-law and the speakers had been wired wrong so they were out of phase!)

I was wrong in the original post. It was the specifications for my amplifier that had sinus power.

Here are some pictures of the specifications for my speakers and [url=“http://www.skeptiker.no/pics/amplifier.jpg”]amplifier.

I was wrong in the original post. It was the specifications for my amplifier that had sinus power.

Here are some pictures of the specifications for my speakers and amplifier.

Ok, I was wrong again. Why can’t you edit posts here? It was the speakers that had sinus power, but I can see the english translation now.

if only manufacturers actually specified -3db frequency range, but they frequently specify -10db range, or even just range

but even if they specified -3db range, the endpoints of the range are not anywhere as important as what happens in between.

Looking at your speaker specifications it states that long term power output is 80Watts.

This means in theory that you could pump that 80Watt signal to them indefinately, whereas the short term power, would be better known as the peak power, perhaps mixed in a little with ‘music power’.
You might only be able to maintain this for perhaps a few tenths of a second, or maybe more, or perhaps less, this is not actually specified - this is just one of the misleading things about some manufacturers data.

Lets just concentrate on the 80Watt continuous rating, the actual frequnecy of the signal input is not specified, most manufacturers will quote the maximum continuous power at around 1KHz, which is near the middle range of human speech.

This does not really give a good indication of what will happen if you tried to put 80 Watts of power into those speakers at say 8KHz.

This might seem nitpicking, but I notice that these speakers are composites, that is, they have two elements -a tweeter and a woofer.

When electrical impulses arrive at your speaker they are divided up according their frequency to go more to the woofer, or more to the tweeter.

The circuit that does this work is called a crossover network, and these too have power handling capacities.
There is a possibililty that although the woofer speakers can handle 80 Watts of power, the tweeters cannot, in fact it is pretty unlikely that they can.

If you like playing electronic dance music such as is popular in Europe, then these speakers might not be able to cope with the power of the higher frequencies in such music.
This is not easy to relate to the happy consumer in an electrical goods shop who just wants a simple purchase, so manufacturers will sometimes help out by specifying the type of music these speakers are best suited to, things like ‘modern sounds’ speakers, or perhaps ‘rock music’ speakers are supposed to give an indication.

Sometimes it is useful to look at the way the instruction manual is written as it can give clues, but usually speakers like these are pretty much general purpose anyway so you should be ok, just don’t imagine them to be audiophile speakers and you will be happy.

The impedance shows some numbers that need to be matched to the amplifier you either own or are about to purchase.

Modern electronics are so good these days, and so tolerant of a wide range of operating conditions such as differing speaker impedances that if you stick to an amplifier with 4-to-8ohm impedance you will be fine.

When you get into specialised sound systems then impedance matching can make quite a differance to the power delivery.

Next is sensitivity - Loudspeakers are actually remarkably inefficient machines, they do not turn all that much of the electrical energy into sound waves, and this figure relates to that efficiency in a roundabout way.
To get this figure for sensitivity, a microphone is placed at some specified distance from the speaker, a signal of known power and frequency is fed into the speaker, and the magnitude ot the acoustic signal is measured on the microphone.
The more noise you get from a speaker for the same input power, the more efficient it is.(this figure can be fiddled by simply placing the microphone closer to the loudspeakers, so that distance is all important when you compare speakers)

Very efficient speakers will achieve perhaps 94dB, and if you stood them next to these and compared, the differance would seem very large as this is over 4 times louder.
Less efficient speakers can go as low as 70dB and are virtual black holes when it comes to consuming power and returning very little, it ends up meaning you need lots and lots of power to drive them.

These speakers are near to mid range.

There is no hard and fast rule to wether speaker efficiency influences the quality of the sound you will hear, some low efficiency speakers sound gorgeous, so do some high efficiency ones but I have found more of the lower efficiency ones do sound better.

Bandwidth - the idea here is that if you put in say 50 Watts and checked the amount of acoustic output, it would stay exactly the same across the whole of the frequency range the speaker is designed to reproduce, so the chart produced on a graph would be flat.

Reality is that this just does not happen, and moving coil loudspeakers such as these have a very bumpy bandwidth chart indeed.

I notice that their specification is ±4 dBs, a total of an 8dB variation form maximum to minimum.

Since 3dBs corresponds to a doubling of quantity, what is being said is that at some part of the bandwidth the acoustic output is at least 4 times greater(actually it looks to be around 6 or 7 times greater) than at other parts of the bandwidth.

(it is usual to quote the ±3dB points and the ±4dB ones quoted here are used to make it appear that the bandwidth is better than it really is - it ould be hiding rather a lot)

This might seem alarming, but if you were able to obtain a chart of the frequency response of your speakers it might not be so.

The public have cottoned on to the fact that wide bandwidth=desirable, however your hearing likely tops out at 12KHz, oh you may hear things above that range but you ear sensitivity to such sound drops off very rapidly and it can take an enormous volume at 18KHz for you to hear the slight whistle - pity you neighbors dog though.

Not only does the sensitivity of your hearing fall off pretty rapidly above 12KHz, it also becomes poor at discriminating the differance between say 16KHz and 17KHz so you can hardly tell them much apart unless under test conditions.

What I’m saying is that all that bandwidth is not always as important as it seems, its just a headline number the public latch on to, unnecassarily.

If you ever do obtain that bandwidth chart, what you really want to see is a smooth variation, with no sudden jumps or troughs, this way you don’t get sudden ‘boominess’ in your music on certain songs.

It is not at all easy to make moving coil loudspeaker with even a fairly flat frequency response chart, you can imagine that such loudspeakers, sometimes called monitor speakers are very expensive,(not to be confused with the manufacturer that uses that term as a brand name)

Unfortunately the term monitor speakers can also mean a loadspeaker that a stage performer can hear to judge whether they are getting the sound right for their performance, but these generarally have amplifiers boult into them.These are relatively small compared to the great big Marshall speaker stacks you see on stage and face toward the performer.

I have seen true monitor speakers where there was a production run of many thousands at the Wharfedale factory just a couple of dozen miles from me.
Of those couple of thousand speakers, perhaps 80 pairs would happen to have an exceptionally good frequency response chart, and these would be pulled out of that production run and rebadged, and repriced.
I’ll leave it there for now and come back to the amplifier specifications later.

oh i didnt notice you posted the specs of your system.

so you bought a surround sound package with the receiver all in one box right ?

u can’t expect it to be any good.

the most telling parameter of your speakers is 9kg weight. there is a very good correlation between speaker quality and its weight. 9kg is quite low ( bad ).

3/4" tweeter is another tell-tale sign that its a lowish-power speaker. a 1" tweeter would be used for a powerful speaker.

another way to tell ur speaker sux is that tweeter material is poly, as cheap as it gets. better tweeters use doped fabric, titanium or aluminum diaphragms.

in summary next time you buy speakers, it doesnt have to be big, but it should give you back pain when you try to lift it.