I was surprised to not find a topic on this while i searched thread titles. I'm curious as to whether there is a certain science to attaining a specific "power response" to make a speaker sound.. well, better! I've seen the term mentioned by some highly respected speaker designers about how a speaker 'energizes' the room but never seen any actual data to work off.
What is power response?!
What is power response?!
Hm. Maybe you want to rename to Sarcatx.
Seriously, though, power response can be found by integrating the frequency response over all angles. This is a non-trivial task. You can make certain simplifying assumptions, such as guessing that response won't deviate too much over small angles, to reduce data collection.
Why is power response important? People don't listen to speakers in anechoic chambers, but in real rooms, so there's a lot of indirect sound energising the room. If the speaker is fairly wide dispersion in the upper midrange yet starts beaming strongly in the top end, then it'll sound lifeless because the high frequencies aren't perceived as "ambient" as the upper mids are, which is the case with many speakers. In many instances, also, the mid-tweeter crossover point happens when the mid is already beaming a bit. The tweeter, being smaller, will disperse more widely into the room compared to the mid at the same frequency; speakers with this characteristic tend to sound slightly bright a bit above the crossover point because the tweeter is throwing more energy into the room just above crossover than the mid is just below crossover, and the reverberant field produced by the tweeter is being perceived in contrast to the reverberant field produced by the mid. The non-flat power response will thus tend to produce a non-uniform sound field even though the on-axis response of the speaker might be impeccably flat.
Cheers,
Francois.
Seriously, though, power response can be found by integrating the frequency response over all angles. This is a non-trivial task. You can make certain simplifying assumptions, such as guessing that response won't deviate too much over small angles, to reduce data collection.
Why is power response important? People don't listen to speakers in anechoic chambers, but in real rooms, so there's a lot of indirect sound energising the room. If the speaker is fairly wide dispersion in the upper midrange yet starts beaming strongly in the top end, then it'll sound lifeless because the high frequencies aren't perceived as "ambient" as the upper mids are, which is the case with many speakers. In many instances, also, the mid-tweeter crossover point happens when the mid is already beaming a bit. The tweeter, being smaller, will disperse more widely into the room compared to the mid at the same frequency; speakers with this characteristic tend to sound slightly bright a bit above the crossover point because the tweeter is throwing more energy into the room just above crossover than the mid is just below crossover, and the reverberant field produced by the tweeter is being perceived in contrast to the reverberant field produced by the mid. The non-flat power response will thus tend to produce a non-uniform sound field even though the on-axis response of the speaker might be impeccably flat.
Cheers,
Francois.
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