With all we can do with modern electronics, modern high strength materials and the huge CPU processing power at our disposal why do little speakers still not sound (IMO) all that much better than they did 30 years ago?
Why have improvements in speaker technology with respect to bigger sound in small packages been relatively meager over the last few decades?
You still need to move air. You have to move more air to make more sound and at least right now, we still use bigger speaker cones to move enough air to fill large areas.
IOW, there’s no replacement for displacement, to steal a phrase from the gearheads.
Stereos have shrunk tremendously. I’m amazed at the sound created by modern computer speakers. I bought a little pocket sized speaker for my mp3 player that just blew me away. The amplified speaker is rechargeable and perfect for someone like me that dislikes ear buds.
I grew up when speakers were 3 feet tall and weighed 30lbs each. I have a set ofSansui Speakers hanging on my living room wall. What they doing today is incredible.
You can in a way. That is a big part of what Bose does but their stuff isn’t cheap. I used to work in their headquarters and the amount of money and brainpower they spend on that type of problem is astounding. It is almost impossible to exactly replicate the sound produced by high quality large speakers with very small ones but there are strategies that can be used to make it come close. A lot of sound perception is not based on a straight physics but psychoacoustics instead (basically tricking the listener’s brain into hearing a quality that isn’t really there based on the sound profile alone).
You can buy small speakers from Bose and others that sound very good especially for their size. However, you may be asking why so many small speakers sound like crap. That is a different answer. Many people don’t care about sound quality much at all and that is even more true to day than it was 20 or even 40 years ago. People seemed to have gotten used to the tiny sound produced by all of their portable devices instead of listening to large stereos at home. Price is the main thing that drives sales for that very large consumer group so it becomes a race to the bottom for manufacturers to produce the cheapest speakers they can that work at all.
That’s still a pair of 12 inch woofers.
To match base response of that w a desktop 6" speaker, you’d have to increase the cone travel by a factor of four. That’s not going to happen.
Little computer speakers do nicely on mid and high end, but for proper bone shaking base, you still need to have a decent woofer.
I would challenge your assertion.
My experience is the same as aceplace57. Thirty years ago, you needed behemoth tower speakers to get great sound–small speakers were almost an afterthought. Today, with the predominance of 5.1 systems, there are an abundance of small speaker options for an audiophile (small speakers + subwoofer). As Shagnasty notes though, if you want true audiophile sound, you have to pay for it. Just because the speakers are smaller, does not mean the price is.
I think a big part of why our speakers our smaller is because the sub (the .1) is on it’s own rather than part of the main cabinets now. You can tuck it away in a hidden corner and just have two small bookshelf speakers with midrange and tweeters and get great sound.
Speakers have advanced quite a bit, but if you want loud music in your house, you still need a sub and if you want loud music in a concert environment you still need BIG speakers.
Why can’t modern audio engineering & science deliver big sound in a little speaker package?
Gallifreian technology still not available on 21st century Earth.
because physics.
in order to reproduce low frequencies (bass,) speakers have to be able to move (compress/rarefy) lots of air. In order to do that they need a combination of a large radiating surface (big cone) and either high excursion capability and/or some sort of acoustic impedance matching such as a reflex enclosure or an acoustic horn. Bass frequencies are more or less omnidirectional so they propagate outward from the speaker in all directions. a small 3" speaker can flap back and forth a little bit at 20 Hz, but it can’t transfer enough energy through the air for you to perceive anything. Plus, human hearing is incredibly insensitive to low frequencies so you’re doubly screwed.
See, Bose kind of “tricks” you. The WaveRadio is a good example. It doesn’t produce any bass. It barely reaches down into the midbass. But using a transmission line enclosure design gets them enough midbass such that people listen to this clock radio with tiny speakers and think “Wow! Those little speakers can do that? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!”
then of course there are other tricks like “harmonics enhancement” which add a little bit of low-order harmonics to make you think you’re hearing bass. It can be convincing.
well, they have and they haven’t. They haven’t because most speakers are still the same dynamic loudspeaker design that’s been around for 70 years. A cone with a surround, suspension, basket, voice coil and magnet. What has changed is amplifier power. Way back in the day, a “hi-fi” amplifier was a 5 to 8 watt tube amp. You needed speakers with large diaphragms and high sensitivities to make the most of the few watts you had.
Now, hell, it’s trivial to build a high quality amp with hundreds of watts per channel. Having that much power to throw around means you can make low sensitivity speakers with smooth frequency response and low distortion. You can use whatever cone materials and treatments you want, and just throw more power at them to make up for the loss in sensitivity.
Some of the better speakers are designed to sit up against a wall. That makes a noticeable difference in their bass.
I recently bought a Four Force guitar amp. Only 5Watts and 12 lbs. It’s got a noticeably big sound for an amp with only a 10" speaker. But it does need to be up against a wall to get the best bass. Also the angle of the speaker is important. I guess it’s about 35 degrees?
it’s got two ports in the back that is designed to work against a wall. Interesting engineering design.
http://www.guitarworld.com/files/imagecache/futureus_imagegallery_fullsize/gallery/FFAMP3_0.jpg
Times change. From the comic strip Zits (link to the comic):
(Jeremy Duncan and his father Walt are up in the attic.)
Walt: Behold! My old Soundcrusher 200 XSLB’s!
Jeremy: Whoa!
**Walt: ** 22-inch woofers, 4-inch titanium tweeters… 65 watts of vinyl wood-grained fury! For a time, these were the biggest speakers in the whole dorm!
**Jeremy: **Wow. How humiliating for you!
**Walt: **No! Back then bigger meant better!
Wife wants to get Oldest a soundbar for her TV because the internal speakers sound, in her words, like shit. She is under the mistaken impression that you can get decent sound from a bottom of the line soundbar. Has she learned nothing in 38 years of marriage? I mean, other than how she should bounce things like this off an audio professional.
Anyway, MIL is giving away her late husband’s Sansui SP2500X speakers and a Pioneer receiver that hasn’t blown up yet driving them. Overrated speakers compared with the best new stuff, but they’re free and neither of them are audiophiles, nor do they play things loud. I’d take them but I have too much audio junk already.
It’s called corner loading. Remember what I said above about bass frequencies being omnidirectional? When you put a speaker up against a wall or in the corner of the room you’re blocking the sound from propagating behind the speaker and redirecting it towards you. If you thing sticking a speaker box up against a wall is “interesting,” go look up the Klipschorn.
jz78817 has covered the ground nicely.
I’ll add a couple of little things.
The ear/brain can be fooled into perceiving bass that isn’t there by making use of the phenomenon of “the missing fundamental” - essentially by reproducing harmonics of the bass, the ear inserts the missing bass.
There are speaker systems that can produce insane power levels in very small packages. And with almost arbitrary bass. A modulated high pressure air source does a remarkable job, and with care can even sound half decent. A bit limited in high frequency response. But has limitless bass. Remember Apocalypse Now? The scene where the choppers play the Ride of the Valkyrie. The speakers are fed bleed air from the turbine, and an electromagnetic modulating valve controls the air flow. How loud would you like? Some attempts at high intensity ultra low frequency sound generation have used similar techniques. No much here of value in a domestic setting however.
Overall speaker design has not progressed much. The fundamental design is little changed from the 1920’s. Advances in magnetic materials, computer optimisation of the magnetic circuit and cone design, plus some advances in cone materials (although ironically, paper is still one of the best materials, just rather advanced paper). Distortion levels are much lower, frequency response much more even, and breakup modes in the passband mostly a thing of the past.
Placing bass drivers against walls or in corners reduces the space they radiate into. A bass speaker is essentially an omnidirectional radiator. Placed against a wall it radiates into half space, and the energy that would have gone backwards comes forwards. On the floor against a wall, quarter space, and in a corner, eighth space. This analysis only works for wavelengths that are large relative to the speaker itself. For wavelengths that are of a similar order to the speakers or the room, or the distance from speakers to walls, it all gets horrible.
It is important to always keep in mind what the wavelengths involved are. Sound travels at about 340ms[sup]-1[/sup]. So as a good approximation 1kHz is one foot long. 100Hz is 10 feet, and 20 Hz is 50 feet. A lot of drivel is written about bass that somehow imagines that the wavelengths are vastly shorter than this. Quarter wavelength distances are however important - as you will see nulls occur at these lengths.
There are some quite evil cabinet designs that can produce quite prodigious bass. Horns that involve resonant lines are a good example. They typically have a quite limited bandwidth - often being useless above about 100Hz, and will suffer destructive resonances if driven lower than 20Hz, but can create silly levels of bass in their passband. None the less, the physics of the system still demands a quite large (by domestic standards) cabinet.
Can you give us a cite for the chopper system? My Googling has not come up with anything yet.
A bit of research shows a slightly more complex story. Electropneumatic loudspeakers are the loudest thing you can build, and they do get used on aircraft.
However the Apocalypse Now story is not right. (Well it is fiction, but is was based on reality of sorts). The actual system used in Vietnam that the movie scene is based upon was a 1000W Beachmaster mounted in a Huey. It is a conventional electrical system, not electro-pneumatic (if a 1000W tube based system can be called conventional.)
I got the story from an audio engineer who specialised in speaker design, but he probably got it from a garbled source. It is plausible that an electropneumatic system could have been used in Vietnam, given their use elsewhere on choppers, but it wasn’t.
True, subs have helped a lot, but still there have been dramatic advances in practical technology, if not in basic approach.
Right … but,
Also right, but …
(sidebar)
Keep in mind that that 5W is rated at some distortion level, and you’re exceeding that level dramatically, so you’re really getting a lot more than 5W. Still, I’m always amazed when I set up my 375WPC stereo keyboard rig (129 dB theoretic max SPL at 1M) and my guitarist can out-loud me with his 8W boutique amp. But, my rig is made for minimum distortion; his isn’t, and we’re probably drawing similar amounts of AC power.
and finally, the answer to the “buts” above:
Thanks for beating me to it.
There’s a HUGE difference in the quality and efficiency of the really loud speakers we use for stage applications. (Sure, we also have buckets more power – no argument there! But speakers are also a good bit more efficient, and can handle a lot more power without burning themselves up.)
I remember a big advance in the early 70’s, with the first of the long-throw (high excursion) speakers. The first ones that had those big surrounds, where you could hear nice deep bass from a mere 6" speaker, which would have required a 12" before. But yeah, they had to have 4 times the excursion to push the same amount of air, and there were concomitant disadvantages.
I don’t know when they started using transmission line designs; I first knew about them in the mid 70’s. It’s an even bigger compromise, basically tuning the woofer enclosure to resonate on a wide frequency band that was matched to where the speaker’s output dropped off, basically extending its frequency response nearly an octave. The obvious drawback is lack of clarity; the resonating would cause the sound to continue after the signal stopped, but I heard several very good speakers where this wasn’t noticeable.
The biggest revolution in basic speaker design was the Hill Plasmatronic. I know about those because my father (a patent attorney) deposed Hill as a laser expert in a case, and he got a chance to show off his “hobby project”. Those used lasers to produce a spherical plasma gas ball whose radius was precisely linear with the input signal: in effect, the ideal speaker. As it turns out, audiophiles didn’t like how it sounded. I suspect it was too accurate, and didn’t sound enough like the speakers that audio engineers use when mastering. It had other issues; it couldn’t go very low in frequency so a woofer was required, and the biggest drawback: you had to keep a cylinder of nitrogen gas, which it slowly used up.
Most music that people listen to now is so compressed it doesn’t matter what you listen to it with. Kids have grown up listening to highly compressed audio streams with no dynamic range to speak of thru cheap ear buds. Play some of that thru an audiophile type system and it will sound like crap. Play it thru some cheap ass small speakers and it will sound just like they are used to hearing. Crappy but acceptable. Acceptable has become the new norm.
Transmission line speakers are a bit of a misnomer. There has been a significant amount of theoretical and experimental work done since the 70’s when Bailey and Bud Fried were pushing the idea. Martin J. King contributed a significant body of knowledge. Overall for bass, TL designs are not at all a transmission line, but a form of damped resonant pipe. The work done now allows for very accurate design prediction and modelling of designs. What becomes interesting is that once you start to treat them as a resonant pipe all sorts of improvements are possible relative to the old style, set of the pants designs. You can built a TL for upper bass and mid ranges - I have done it. But you need a line that is long relative to the wavelength of the sound being reproduced.
Plasma and ion speakers have been around for a while in different forms. The single biggest problem is that they cost insane money compared to the result. They also often have a low level hiss that is hard to mask. For reasonable money you can buy conventional high and mid frequency drivers that have remarkably low distortion. That is for some values of “reasonable”. Where speaker design for critical sound comes unstuck is in the off axis response, and the room interactions. Diffraction issues, and issues coupled to the physical size of the drivers make for problems that are essentially insoluble in most situations. At least not without significant expense and physically large solutions. The most important component in speaker design is the room it is placed in. Room acoustics so vastly outweigh everything else that it is silly. But most audiophiles don’t really get it. Floyd Toole is the go-to guy on a lot of this.
Yep, but that isn’t always the compression. Thanks to another thread I replaced the foams on my Koss HV-1 headphones (sometimes shown with ludicrous claims of going from 17Hz to 30,000HZ–claims I sometimes believe) and tried listening to Highway 61 on CD. The band filled a full and deep soundstage behind Bob but, because he can’t sing and was recorded poorly, he sounded like a charcoal sketch on rice paper hanging loosely in the front. The original mix on LP didn’t have that.
Digital audio also purposely cuts out frequencies above and below the range of human hearing. No use wasting bits on things folks can’t hear, right? Except there is some evidence (I tried looking it up but it took me down a Google rabbit hole and I have to finish this post someday before I die) that we can perceive sound above and below the official thresholds.
