Types and Usage
Traditional speakers are able to produce sound by using an electromagnet to push and pull on a flexible cone. There are three basic types of driver that produce different types of sound: woofers, tweeters and midrange. Your ears ear different sounds depending on the size and frequency of the waves that reach your ears, which is where drivers come in. Traditional speakers use drivers to help translate electrical signals into physical vibrations so that you can hear recorded sounds.
The differences between woofers, tweeters and midrange drivers are mainly size-related. A woofer is the biggest type of driver, and it’s meant to create low-frequency sounds. Meanwhile, tweeters are a lot smaller and they make the highest frequency sounds. Not surprisingly, midrange speakers cover the middle part of the spectrum between the woofers and the tweeters.
Dynamic loudspeakers: The most common type of driver, commonly called a dynamic loudspeaker, uses a lightweight diaphragm, or cone, connected to a rigid basket, or frame, via a flexible suspension, commonly called a spider, that constrains a voice coil to move axially through a cylindrical magnetic gap.
Types of Speaker:
1. Full-range drivers: A full-range driver is a speaker designed to be used alone to reproduce an audio channel without the help of other drivers, and therefore must cover the entire audio frequency range.
2. Subwoofer: A subwoofer is a woofer driver used only for the lowest-pitched part of the audio spectrum: typically below 200 Hz for consumer systems, below 100 Hz for professional live sound, and below 80 Hz in THX-approved systems.
3. Woofer: A woofer is a driver that reproduces low frequencies. The driver works with the characteristics of the enclosure to produce suitable low frequencies. Indeed, both are so closely connected that they must be considered together in use.
4. Mid-range driver: A mid-range speaker is a loudspeaker driver that reproduces a band of frequencies generally between 1–6 kHz, otherwise known as the ‘mid’ frequencies (between the woofer and tweeter).
5. Tweeter: A tweeter is a high-frequency driver that reproduces the highest frequencies in a speaker system. A major problem in tweeter design is achieving wide angular sound coverage (off-axis response), since high frequency sound tends to leave the speaker in narrow beams.
6. Coaxial drivers: A coaxial driver is a loudspeaker driver with two or several combined concentric drivers.
