Speakers

Speaker drivers

Do you know that a single driver in speaker cannot produce the entire freqency range of human hearing?

To be precise, different drivers handle a different range of frequency range.

For example, the woofer produces low frequency sounds ranging between 20 to 500 Hz. The midrange driver is responsible for sound in the frequency range between 200 to 4000 Hz. The tweeter produces high frequency sound from 2,000 Hz to20,000 Hz. For even lower frequency sounds, the sub-woofer handles frequency ranges from 20 to 100 Hz.

The lower the frequency the larger the driver becomes.

Choosing your speaker

Don't be bog down by product specification or test instrument results. Listen to the sound of the speaker. We humans are a far better judge of sound than any machine. Bottom line is, you must like the sound you hear.

Different speakers perform well in different conditions. Some speakers may sound great in large open spaces but fare badly in small confined areas. Ideally speaking, you should listen to speakers with the same area as your home theater area. Beter still, if you could bring home the system to test out.

Instead of listening to speakers as a package, it is wise to listen to them individually.

Check out the treble and bass for the left and right speaker.

Dialogue should sound clear and defined for the center speaker.

Listen carefully to the mid range sounds for surround sound speaker

Directivity of speaker

A good speaker will not sound good above or below the listening position. The vertical directivity is minimized so that you will not get reflections off the ceiling or the floor.

However, its horizontal directivity should cover as much horizontal position as possible. You can test the speaker by playing a pink sound which is a constant signal. Walk left and right of the speaker and the low and mid range frequencies should remain unchanged and constant. You may encounter slight difference in high frequencies as they are highly directional.

Matching of speaker

We need to find out whether the system of speakers work together too. You need to play the program material in which there is movement across the screen. For example, planes taking off and car racing. Unhook the surround speaker to test the front three speakers. The sound have move seamlessly and smoothly across the front of the room. You should not hear discrete sound from a single speaker.

All three front speakers also should sound the same. There should not be any change in harmonics or pitch of the sound. If you hear a different sound from a speaker it means it is mismatched.