How do subwoofers produce such extreme bass?
In: Technology
Big speakers make louder sounds!
You just don’t have big speakers for higher pitches because bigger speakers are terrible at playing back high pitches.
As for why:
A typical speaker is a cone shape and is driven from the center from a coil.
To visualize why this doesn’t work so well think about wiggling a fishing pole. If you wave it back and forth slowly it stays pretty straight. If you wave it a bit more quickly it gets floppy. If you wave it real fast you just get it bending back and forth in place.
The fact that a speaker is round instead of a stick, and shaped like a cone helps prevent that to a point, but the same principle applies. A big speaker works fine at low frequencies, but at high frequencies the shape of the cone just kind of deforms.
* Sub woofers function like most other speakers.
* A coil of wire is attached to a large diaphragm.
* The coil sits on a magnet.
* When electricity moves through the coil it causes the coil to move relative to the magnet.
* This movement causes the diaphragm to move which causes the air to move, which is sound.
* Sub woofers are good at making low frequency tones because of their large size, the type of material they are made out, and the shape/size/material of the boxes they are installed in.
All speakers work by the same principle. They have a part that vibrates, and running electrical current through it causes it to vibrate.
Running the same amount of electrical current through two speakers will generate different frequencies of vibration if one speaker is bigger and heavier than the other, because that requires more energy to vibrate. Basically, subwoofers are just bigger and heavier speakers. The part that vibrates is more resistant to vibrating, making it vibrate more slowly with the same amount of current.
What we perceive as sound is the movement of air in a specific range of frequencies. Subwoofers, due to the size of their drivers and magnets, move large volumes of air at the lower frequencies.
That’s literally what they do. They pick up low Hz sounds and amplify them. Hhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhgggggHhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhgggggHhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhgggggHhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhggggg
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