Loudspeakers - Part ONE

3 Important Reasons why the Loudspeaker is the most important component in your system – Mervyn Augustine 

High-Fidelity Loudspeakers. The mechanical interface between :

1. Your system – electronics & sources. It becomes the voice of your system – the mechanical passage that speaks for the amplifiers, the pre-amplifiers, and the source (such as, CD players, Turntables, Music Streamers, etc..)

2. The room – the environment & acoustics. The way the loudspeaker is designed to interface and interact with your room. The way sound travels from the speaker to the walls of your room, before it reaches you, the listener – you’ll hear terms like “boom”, “echo”, “reverb”, these are some effects caused by the listening environment more than anything else. Other elements such as standing waves – a stationary wave, having constant magnitude, first noticed by Michael Faraday in 1831, can be calculated given room dimensions, especially in rectangular or square shaped rooms. We shall discuss more on these topics on later posts.

3. The listener – You. The way you listen. Your preferences. Taking everything into account – the summation of the electronics, the acoustics, the loudspeaker effects, and “seen” in your perspective. A topic explored in depth by Fletcher and Munson form 1933, and later, Robinson and Dasson in 1956. We will also come to that on later posts.

These are 3 salient reasons why loudspeakers are the most influential component in your system.

We shall talk more about loudspeakers in the next post, discussing some specifications to observe that are important.