I'm a pretty smart guy (I think). I can not for the life of me understand what damping factor does or means, and more importantly, how it relates to making music.
It's a very, very complex topic with a lot of nuances. It's a combination of electrical and mechanical control of a system. For example, a dash-pot is a mechanical form of damping, as are fluid couplings.
Looking for forward to see graphs and charts to illustrate the workings of damping/feedback
That's going to be a lot of work.
The tech gurus will probably rip me a new one, but here goes anyway. A speaker is like an electrical motor, give it a burst of electricity, the motor spins fast, then coasts down to a stop. Fine for a motor, but not fine for a speaker. Causes audible distortion. Damping is putting on the brakes to minimize the extracurricular excursions of the speaker cone and more closely conform to the electrical signal as intended.
This is true when the power source is opened and closed. In some types of motors, it's possible for the motor to recapture the rotational energy by converting back into electrical energy. The resulting load quickly slows the motor down quickly, appearing like a highly damped system. Again, this is a very complex topic.
Thank you Mr. Agedhorse.
Per the article, my 16 AWG speaker cables are damping just fine from an 800 watt head.
Ummm, yup.
Damping factor is a "small signal" parameter, meaning that it's only meaningful when an amp is not being overdriven.
In the small signal regime, damping factor behaves like a resistance in series with the output. But there's already a resistance in series with the output: The voice coil. To give an example, an 8-Ohm speaker might have a 6-Ohm voice coil. If you consider the amp and speaker as a system, the total amount of damping is dominated by the voice coil resistance. This is necessary in order to achieve an acceptable response curve. Most of the amp's output power goes into heating the voice coil.
What bass amps do when they're overdriven... Andy's post illustrates the challenge of design a bass amp so it behaves in a stable and musically forgiving fashion.
In the linear range, it appears to be a small signal parameter, but as soon as the feedback loop opens (like in my example where clipping occurs in a feedback amplifier) because the error signal saturated trying to correct the incorrectable.
This is easier to understand. Why would someone want higher or lower damping?
I would love a more ultra concrete explanation of what this does. It's it higher resolution? Is it a small delay? I'm trying to stay away from magical marketing talk like "Tubey goodness" etc
Damping mostly has to do with feel, it affects the perception of dynamics, the attack envelope, and the resonant interaction of energy stored in the inductive moving mass of the speaker. Looser feels a little more lively, bloomy, interactive… BUT too much of a good thing can quickly become indistinct, sloppy and muddy.
Also, damping isn't really a single number, but can vary quite a bit with frequency, so how the damping is applied also factors into the feel.
This analogy is not correct. It describes the case where you disconnect the speaker after you have given it an impulse of electricity, which is why it coasts. If instead you do to the motor, what you do to a speaker; give it voltage in one direction to make it move one way and then the opposite voltage to get it to go back, neither the speaker or the motor will coast.
Where the analogy does work is when the speaker or motor builds enough momentum that the opposite voltage cannot stop it as fast as it should. Both the speaker or motor will overshoot where they are supposed to go. This is what imperfect damping looks like.
It was an ok loose open loop example, but now apply the motor example to a closed loop application like a servo motor, and the example becomes very good.
As a more motor specific analogy would be an induction motor versus a speaker voice coil, the damping as closely related to "slip", and while this is an open loop process, they are both still tightly coupled. When control is lost between the electrical and mechanical systems, the slip skyrockets in a motor and a speaker voice coil quickly over/under-shoots in a speaker.
It's all based on servo system theory. Again, it's a very, very complicated topic when getting into the quantitative domain.
