{"id":2133,"date":"2019-03-28T13:32:45","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T00:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/?p=2133"},"modified":"2019-04-06T13:37:35","modified_gmt":"2019-04-06T00:37:35","slug":"dd-the-speed-of-bass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/dd-the-speed-of-bass\/","title":{"rendered":"The Speed of Bass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Tech Talk | WRITTEN BY AARON TRIMBLE | March 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast bass, slow bass, sloppy bass, tight bass! Is this sounding like a Dr. Seuss book yet? This is an old concept, but it\u2019s still one that we get here at DD Audio regularly and a lot of folks think that it has to do with the woofer size. Funny thing is that it some of it does, just not in the way that you might think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today we\u2019re going to skip right over the enclosure completely and focus on the woofer. A terrifying number of tech calls here still involve talking about why you gotta use 15\u2019s and 18\u2019s for low bass and smaller woofers like 8\u2019s and 10\u2019s for high bass. Or why some people don\u2019t like big woofers because they don\u2019t sound tight like smaller woofers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we\u2019re ultimately talking about here is control. The amount of control that the woofer has over the cone determines how your woofer will sound as long as the cone is rigid. An 18\u201d woofer can play 60 Hz just fine, however it takes much more work to control this cone 120 times a second (instroke and outstroke) than it does a 10\u201d with the same motor and coil. In fact if we were to play a 10\u201d and an 18\u201d at around \u00bc\u201d or less excursion both woofers would sound almost identical, albeit the 18\u201d would of course be a fair bit louder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Assuming the same motor, coil, and suspension between the woofers, the smaller woofer will only start to sound more precise as we increase the level of excursion on both drivers. As the larger woofer begins to move more, the suspension of the woofer will be taxed more in order to return to the resting position at the same rate of the smaller woofer. The driven motion of the woofer is called the attack while the undriven motion when the woofer returns to rest is called the decay. The larger, heavier cone is harder to move from rest, and similarly the momentum of a heavier cone is harder to return to rest so both the attack and decay suffer as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, if instead of worrying about the level of excursion as our testing scruple, we focus on a far more practical application, volume (dB), the results can be very different. A 3510 has an effective cone area of 67.2 square inches while a 3518 has an effective cone area of 188.69. That means that the 18\u201d has 2.8 times more cone area than the 10\u201d, and will need to move 2.8 times less than the 10\u201d to achieve the same output. The excursion level makes a significant difference in each woofer\u2019s attack and decay. Being that both these woofers are using the same motor and coil, they will have the same XMax value, which tells us how much excursion the woofer is capable of achieving before voice coil begins to reduce the length of it\u2019s coil that is in the magnetic gap where control is strongest. If the 18\u201d is being driven near its XMax limits, the 10\u201d will be required to play well outside it\u2019s optimal control range in order to achieve the same volume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The less a woofer has to move to achieve a desired volume, the better it will sound. The Pro Audio world learned this decades ago. That is why you don\u2019t see tons of high excursion drivers. Pro Audio subwoofers use extremely light soft parts, large motors, and large cones to achieve the most volume with the least excursion. So, next time you\u2019re looking at investing in a sound quality set-up, don\u2019t necessarily look at just small drivers, sometimes the big guys will fit the bill just fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tech Talk | WRITTEN BY AARON TRIMBLE | March 2019 Fast bass, slow bass, sloppy bass, tight bass! Is this sounding like a Dr. Seuss book yet? This is an old concept, but it\u2019s still one that we get here at DD Audio regularly and a lot of folks think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-talk"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2133"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2146,"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2133\/revisions\/2146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifihq.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}