Debunking Audio Myths, Misunderstandings and Misnomers - Part One

Today, I wanted to start a new series that's not going to necessarily be every week or even continuous but, we'll interject these sorts of topics every once in a while, and that topic is audio and video myths. And maybe if it's not a myth, maybe a misunderstanding that's very common that people have when it comes to certain aspects of both audio and video equipment and setups.

Now, you know, there are lots of opinions. You know what they say about opinions. But there are some things that are hard facts. And, you know, people tend to have these ideas that who knows who started them and why they get perpetuated, but that are simply plain wrong when it comes to science, physics, electronics or whatever.

And those are the things that I'm going to cover. So by way of that introduction, today, I wanted to talk about the myth of woofer size. And one thing that I hear time and time again is people saying if you want lots of bass, you need a speaker or a subwoofer with a big woofer or big woofers in it.

Now, that is not necessarily the case. And the reason that that's not necessarily the case is that other than in very, very rare circumstances, we put woofers in cabinets which means that they're in an air volume.

A woofer without the benefit of being in a cabinet in most cases has no bass. None at all. So that's an important thing to remember. Now, why is that important? Well, because there is a marriage between a woofer or woofers and the cabinet that it's in, and it doesn't matter whether it's a sealed cabinet, whether it's a ported cabinet, transmission line, something with, you know, a passive radiator, there's all kinds of techniques that we can use in designing a loudspeaker.

But the woofer size itself doesn't matter at all because it's the dance, that marriage that the woofer and the cabinet are doing. So here's an example. The cabinet volume and the electromechanical, sounds complex, parameters which define all of the things of a woofer, how much magnet strength it has, the voice coil, how long it is, what the gauge of wire is, what the impedance is, and all the mechanical things, the weight of all those moving parts, the flexibility of all of those parts, we usually say compliance of those parts, like the surround, the spider or the damper, all of those things.

Any drive unit, any woofer has a whole list of electromechanical parameters and it's too much to get into a lot of detail here without people that are going, "Oh my god, math, let's not talk about that. That will drive me nuts." So we'll just say there's a whole bunch of characteristics of a woofer and those characteristics, along with different cabinet volumes, different port tuning, different aspects, those are what define the low frequency cutoff or how low that woofer will perform in a particular cabinet.

Now, hopefully, you can see where I'm going with why this is a myth. Well, if I have a big 12-inch woofer in a fairly small cabinet volume, and then I have a 6-and-1/2-inch woofer like this one here in a big cabinet volume and the parameters along with those different cabinet volumes, one big, one small, will define what the bass output is of that entire system.

And a 6-and-1/2-inch woofer with the right parameters in a big cabinet volume, a big volume of air is going to go down lower than that 12-inch woofer in a small volume of air. So I hope you can see why, you know, just saying, "Get a bigger woofer, you'll get more bass," that frankly is nonsense.

Also, one thing that I've heard is that a bigger woofer system will be more efficient and play louder. Total nonsense. Why? Well, think about it. That 12-inch woofer, you've got a lot of stuff, a lot of big parts, a big cone, a big surround, a big voice coil that all have to be moved.

Compared to a 6-and-1/2-inch woofer, all those parts are going to weigh a lot more. So unless you've done a really good job and have a huge motor magnetic system to drive that, chances are that that big woofer is actually going to be less efficient naturally than a smaller 6-and-1/2-inch woofer, for instance. So one other thing that people will say is get a tower speaker that's got lots of woofers in it because you're going to get more bass.

Same thing here. In many cases, yes, that will be true. But in other cases, a single woofer in a specific tower-speaker volume will actually have more bass output or go lower than one with two or three woofers. Again, it depends on the parameters and the particular woofers that are in that system.

So if I take one woofer and I put it in a tower speaker, it's going to have, based on its parameters and the cabinet size, a particular cutoff frequency or a low frequency extension. If I now put a second woofer of exactly the same type, the impedance or the resistance of the system will now be halved because I'm going to put those two woofers electrically connected in parallel, but guess what?

Now, those two woofers are sharing that one cabinet volume and what did I say? Well, now you've got a smaller cabinet volume per woofer. You essentially have a cabinet that's got half the volume when each woofer sees that perspective volume which means, guess what?

With two woofers, that speaker that we're talking about actually doesn't go down as low as with one woofer. The benefit, of course, is two woofers will be more efficient and will be able to handle more power and play louder because it's sharing the amplifier's output between two drive units instead of a single one.

So I guess really what I'm saying is that there are trade-offs that every loudspeaker designer has to make in, you know, looking at cost, size, practicality, you know, what's demanded by the, you know, typical consumer, you know. If we go back to the '70s, you know, 12 and 15-inch woofers were common and you had these big, you know, bar fridge size speakers.

Well, that trend has gone away over the years and people usually are looking for slimmer, less obtrusive-looking speakers which is why you tend to see speakers with smaller woofers and maybe multiples of them. So just remember, comparing speakers just by saying, like in this instance that this M3 with a 6-and-1/2-inch woofer will go lower than this M2 with a 5-and-1/4-inch woofer, it's not necessarily true.

You have to look at the specifications and hope that the manufacturer is telling you the truth in terms of how low they'll play and how loud they'll play. So thanks for watching and if you have any other, you know, things that you've heard that you might think are audio or video myths and you, you know, want me to clear up, you know, leave a comment below and tell me, you know, ask the question, "Is this true or is that true," and I'll try to cover them in a future video or article.