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If speaker size does not affect tone, why do they exist?

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#22
Different speaker sizes have different specs. Go to http://www.usspeaker.com/ and read the frequency of different size speakers. It's interesting to see that there are only a few 10 inch woofers that can produce the frequency of the open E on a bass.

Where as many 15 and 18 inch woofers have no problem going that low.

Andy Lewis of Acme was asked if he could make a cab using a woofer smaller than 10 inches and he responded that it's tuff enough getting a 10 to do the job let alone something smaller. But Andy has a custom made 10 that can produce the freq of the open B of a bass. This comes at an expense. To produce such a low freq, it has to have a long excursion and that means his 10 incher is a power eater and it has low db. Meaning his cabs are not very loud.

So, here's the trade-off and why 10 inchers are so popular. Ten inchers are louder than bigger speakers but overall don't go as low as 15s and 18s.

Loudness has always been a problem for us electric bass players. A 30 watt, single speaker guitar amp is tremendously loud and of course, 50 and 100 watt guitar amps even more so. And yet, for a bass amp to be balanced in loudness to a guitar amp, we need ridiculous power and multi speaker cabs.

IMO, thus the popularity of 10 inch woofer! Loudness! Most 10 inch woofers are much louder than 12s, 15s and 18s. As an example, a 15 inch woofer might be rated at 95 db @ one watt, @ one meter distance. But a 10 inch woofer might be rated at 101 db @ one watt, one meter. Each db = 10% louder. So, 95 db vs 101 db means that the 10 incher is 60% louder than the 15 when the same wattage is used for each speaker.

The trade-off is loudness vs lowness. Want loud? Low end suffers. Want low, volume suffers.

Ten inch woffers are most popular because they are louder. Plus, how often do we bassist focus on open E and open B? Most of our notes are way above 40 hz. So do we really need a low bottomed cab at the expense of lost volume, db?

Once again, it's always been difficult for us bassist to compete against the loudness of guitar amps. My guitarist 30 watt single speaker tube amp means I need at least 500 watts and four 10 inch woofers to keep up.

Personally, and I do mean personally, I like the sound of 15 inch woofers but my God!..........lugging around 2 bass cabs with 2, 15 inchers in each one is sooooo impractical!

Thus, the 10 inch woofer! Smaller and louder.

In ending, this stuff about 10 inch speakers being faster is ********! Totally false! Perhaps the term "faster" means that the sound of 10 inchers is more focused on the midrange and thus sounds like it's faster than a bigger woofer. I don't know! But there is no such thing as faster speakers or faster sound..................!!!!!!!!!!!!

Luv you guys! I mean, I love hearing everybody's expression here on Talk Bass. A wonderful forum!
 
#25
If you take an squareback SVT and rip out the CTS 10s, front baffle and compartment dividers and replace with a new baffle and an 18"... it probably won't sound like an SVT anymore. ALL the ingredients are important, tone is subjective, and sometimes it just happens - despite best efforts to explain why.
 
#27
Flux Jetson said:
EDIT: Title shoud read "If different speaker sizes don't affect tone, why do they exist?" Sorry.
Click to expand...
Dispersion. That is the only factor solely attributed to driver size. Period.
ALL the ingredients are important, tone is subjective, and sometimes it just happens - despite best efforts to explain why.
Click to expand...
There is nothing that isn't very easily explained, if you understand how speakers work. For those who don't, Clarke said it best: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

How do you know whether someone knows how speakers work? Those who do will reply to your question with the same answer I gave. Those who don't will spout extraneous piffel ad nauseum.
 
#28
Yep, it's ALL marketing hype, which is why there are so many 2" subs out there. Oh wait... Even Subway only goes down to 6".

The fact is that there ARE trends in characteristics by driver size, BUT they are not as pronounced as they seemed in the "old days" (ie 70s), and so the "illuminati" of TB, in an effort to dispell that, overcompensate and seriously exaggerate in the other direction that there are NO differences.

If people would just tell the truth as accurately as possible in the first place, we wouldn't have to have this "debate" every week or 2.

If you look at the specs for enough speakers, you will definitely notice there are some typical trends. What people need to remember is that they aren't absolute.

Oh, and whoever said 10s are "louder", sorry, but that's just plain wrong. They typically have lower sensitivity than 15s, and don't move as much air, therefore, they a definitely quieter. The only "louder" thing about them is they might have more mids and highs, which will make them SOUND louder (because those frequencies will get to a point of being unpleasant earlier on that makes you want to turn down).

If all speaker sizes are equal, I really want to see someone post the specs of a 2" driver that can reach down to 50Hz, and a 15 that can play up to 12KHz. When I see that, I'll believe that speaker size doesn't make a difference. I'm guessing those specs won't be forthcoming and there will be a whole raft of excuses why not.
 
#29
Quote "It's marketing hype. Offer different sizes so the consumer thinks they have choices. Market them as having different capabilities, and the consumer will think he hears those differences."

--I disagree. I'm certainly no expert, and I don't really care if there are any tests/graphs, etc. that "prove" that I'm wrong. I can hear a difference. To me, 10's have more punch and 15's sound woofier. But that's only with the same manufacturer's speakers/cabs (and it could be the cab tuning itself, as much as speaker size). Comparing different manufacturer's to one another throws in too many other variables.
 
#30
A small physics lesson on frequency and velocity. I'm Dutch so don't go hating about grammar and stuff, I'm just trying to explain something.

1/T = f and 1/f = T. In wich f = frequency (in Hz) and T =the time of sound wave (in s).
This shows that frequency is nothing more than the number of sound waves in 1 second. But watch what happens when I multiply the wavelenght (in m) with the frequency: m x 1/s = m/s! And that's velocity (v). The wavelenght is mostly falsely mistaken with the frequency.

NOTE: You shouldn't see a sound wave as a sine, but as a pressurewave of compressing and decompressing air, altough the graph derived from those pressure changes is a sine wave.

Well now, back to the size of the conus. It may be said (this is just a hypothesis) that a bigger conus creates a bigger (in lenght) path of pressurewaves, therefore it may be better in diverging troughout the room/stadium etc. And maybe it's just louder because this lenghtening stretches the amplitude. Pure hypothetically this is, tough...

Boy, I want to do research on speakersizes now. xD
 
#31
Below roughly 250 Hz, there are only five things that affect the sound of a mainstream box speaker:

1. Overall sensitivity
2. Box / cone resonant frequency
3. Box / port resonant frequency (if there is a port)
4. Q factor
5. Effect of coil inductance

If you leave overall sensitivity up in the air, and have control over driver design, then you can take a speaker with one driver diameter, and replicate its tone with another diameter.

Now, a speaker has a number of limits: Voice coil heating, cone excursion, and air turbulence in the port. To achieve a desired volume level using off-the-shelf drivers (or semi-custom), the designer might consider approaches that include a larger diameter driver, or an array of smaller drivers. The tradeoffs have changed over the years as driver design has evolved.

Of course the model line-ups from any particular maker are also influenced by their expectations of market demand.

I'm guilty of a couple of brief monographs on the subject of speaker theory, at my website.
 
#35
Please tell me that is not a serious question, jarrydee? Did you ever notice problems with your 4x10 before? If not, then why would you need to get rid of it?

5 String, certainly there's an element of economics involved, but you KNOW someone would come up with a 2" sub like I mentioned if it could be done, JUST TO DO IT. That's the nature of the human race. Maybe in another 20 or 50 years, with greater materials science and engineering, it could be done. But I don't think anyone has cracked that code just yet, because the physical envelopes are too hard to push that far with what we've got at the moment.

Think about it for a second. A 2" driver has an area of pi square inches (3.14...). A 15" driver has an area of about 176 square inches, or over 56 TIMES the size of the 2", so doesn't it stand to reason that they will have very different capabilities, especially since sound reproduction is based in distance and time to begin with? It's like trying to have a charter bus and a sports car with the same performance. Sure, with enough engineering to compensate for the inherent differences, you can get a lot of overlap in the performance, but what makes more sense is to use the sports car when you want to go fast around curvy roads, and the bus when you want to move a lot of people from one point to another. Don't read too much into the characteristics used in the analogy, but rather at the overall view that size of 2 objects, especially when vastly different, can affect performance in a variety of ways, some of which might not be immediately obvious.
 
#36
jarrydee said:
I don't want my 410 messing up dispersion.
Click to expand...
It already does. Dispersion is inversely proportional to the size of the radiator. When you place drivers side by side they couple in the lows and mids to act as one larger radiator, and that results in dispersion being halved. So in a 410 the wider midrange dispersion of the tens is squandered; a 115 has better dispersion than a 410.
I always figured a lot of it had to do with economics. It seems to me that it would be cheaper/easier and to design and produce a large single driver cabinet than it would be to design and produce a cabinet with multiple smaller drivers that gets the same in terms of frequency response.
Click to expand...
True, that's why drivers larger than four inches exist. But the larger the driver the narrower the dispersion as one goes higher in frequency, so well engineered systems use larger drivers for the lows, medium size drivers for mids, small drivers for highs, to maintain consistent dispersion across the full audio spectrum with minimum build cost. You could accomplish the same thing with a vertical array of fours, but the cost would be far higher.
 
#37
I think as technology got better so did cab's. In the 60's you only had the choice of a full range 15" that could generate proper bass reflex. Now we have materials like the neo speakers where the magnet can be big enough to generate low frequencies with a smaller cone width while still having a manageable weight. Also, cone's used to be paper, now they are made from all types of materials.

However, there are people who still want old school tone. So they have to manufacture both. Do we really need tube amps? No.... but that is what we want right?
 
#38
That's what I love about America, Bill. Everyone thinks their opinion is valid (whether or not science, truth, fact, and reality can back them up), and is at least as good as that of anyone else. It's funny, too, how so many will continue to argue against reality, even after a true expert has proven their hypothesis to be utterly fallacious.
 
#39
jungleheat said:
Please tell me that is not a serious question, jarrydee? Did you ever notice problems with your 4x10 before? If not, then why would you need to get rid of it?

5 String, certainly there's an element of economics involved, but you KNOW someone would come up with a 2" sub like I mentioned if it could be done, JUST TO DO IT. That's the nature of the human race. Maybe in another 20 or 50 years, with greater materials science and engineering, it could be done. But I don't think anyone has cracked that code just yet, because the physical envelopes are too hard to push that far with what we've got at the moment.

Think about it for a second. A 2" driver has an area of pi square inches (3.14...). A 15" driver has an area of about 176 square inches, or over 56 TIMES the size of the 2", so doesn't it stand to reason that they will have very different capabilities, especially since sound reproduction is based in distance and time to begin with? It's like trying to have a charter bus and a sports car with the same performance. Sure, with enough engineering to compensate for the inherent differences, you can get a lot of overlap in the performance, but what makes more sense is to use the sports car when you want to go fast around curvy roads, and the bus when you want to move a lot of people from one point to another. Don't read too much into the characteristics used in the analogy, but rather at the overall view that size of 2 objects, especially when vastly different, can affect performance in a variety of ways, some of which might not be immediately obvious.
Click to expand...

well, I was both serious and NOT. I am a gas-aholic and will use any excuse to get a new cab. I am kinda new to bass so I take the advice of others until I learn. So if a 12 or 15 would be better than a 410 , I would be willing to change cabs. I have the TC bc410 cab and was hoping to add the TC 212 to it but after reading around hear it looks like mixing cabs is not a good thing. I know there is a lot of BS that fly's around hear, but I am just new enough that I don't know what is BS and whats not. Sorry if it all seems stupid, but I feel I just learned from you a little, so I do not regret what I posted, or I would not have learned! I work in a studio and am starting to see that there is as much BS in the bass world as the recording world, ya know, digital VS. Analog, the best Mic preamps have 50 pound transformers or tubes...It is hard to tell what is real and what is opinion!
 
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