what is FULL RANGE?

[mrnedrub]

Hi can anyone tell me about full range drivers and the theory behind them? The reson l ask is that l had learnt about speakers early on in life from my father and he had explained to me that sounds were frequencies. l then learnt about the struggle that a speaker has in making a 100hz ,1000hz ,10000hz (and all in between) all at the same time! So l then learnt about 2-way spks and how the high/mid went to the tweeter and the mid/low to the woofer. Then found out that this to has problems in that the sound to the tweeter can be afected by the draw of power to the woofer in peak demands(even though the peaks are only a fraction of a second). When l learnt about crossovers and that there were active ones, l then found out about bi-amping(l realize that you dont have to use active crossovers for bi-amping, its just when l learnt about it). When bi-amping was explianed to me it just seemed so lodgical to send the particular freq(in which the amp also had its own power supply)to the relivent speaker/s. How could you go wrong, no stealing of power from other drivers, individual power amps with your choice of power output relivent to the speaker and the from what lve learnt/worked out , you dont (if using an active crossover)have issues with changing ohms depending on exurtion of the speaker. So anyway........when l saw full range drivers it seemed to be going back to the begining of basics, but l try to keep an open mind and lm constantly learning how little l really know about all things audio. Conserquentialy this has shown me how much there is to learn and like just like most other thing l suspect that its always going to be evolving so the learning will never really stop! Thanks for reading this long and very badly spelt message(left school very very early) So can anyone tell me about full range and the pros and cons .............thank from shaun in australia

 

[validator]

Full-Range

Hi Shaun,

a "true" fullrange speaker should play the complete range from 20-20000Hz +/- 3dB. That's of course pure theory and I never heard of such a drive unit.
For me a good fullrange unit must play from 50 - 16000Hz. Reason: there is not that much music (I'm listening to) which has material below 50Hz.
On the upper end: well my ears (> 35 years) don't hear a lot above 16k

Regards
Thorsten

 

[ThorstenL]

Re: Full-Range

Konnichiwa,

a "true" fullrange speaker should play the complete range from 20-20000Hz +/- 3dB. That's of course pure theory and I never heard of such a drive unit.

Hmm, what you note above is one of those senseless truisms.

I commented on that before:

Some rambeling thoughs on Speaker design issues (part 1)

One may very well define a fullrange speaker more colloquially as a speaker that has applied a signal that has no part of the spectrum filtered out prior to the application to the drive unit. This seems to be the current usage, one may choose the more apropriate terms "single driver" or "wideband driver", but I am not sure they really are more precise to the average person.

Sayonara