Who is smarter, a speaker designer or an amp designer?
- Thread starter caesar
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Great question Caesar. I would venture that the amp takes more math and measurement and is more serial, the speaker more listening and iterative looping.
I'm tending towards thinking they're both equally smart with the following observation: my experience with building my own speakers suggests to me that once you make the transition from passive to DSP-based active, the required level of smartness in amp and speaker building diminishes to the level of just doing things 'by the book'. The amps can be smaller and the loads are easier. Putting the drivers in a robust enclosure of suitable volume is all you have to do with the speakers. The DSP then takes over a large proportion of the required 'smarts', but even then it is just a question of doing things methodically, although the optimum formula requires some good judgement to arrive at. All those problems of differing driver efficiency, phase shifts and so on that take up most of the passive speaker designer's energy just disappear like a bad dream. Similarly, the amp ceases to be some huge leviathan that has to drive the entire frequency range into a power-sapping crossover and becomes just a building block as its job is so easy. In other words the overhead of simply getting to the stage of a functional system is much reduced, allowing the designer to concentrate purely on voicing the speaker - no soldering required.
Its such an open-ended question its very hard to know where to begin. I've never designed speakers, only amps. The challenges involved in designing amps have expanded for me the more I've learned about how they sound. In the early days I focussed on getting great measurements (THD in particular), that (as Gary's mentioned) requires a mathematical kind of approach. Its mainly 'feed-forward'. More recently I've been designing amps by feedback - i.e. iteration, which I take it is how speakers are designed.
They're both highly complex. Years ago speakers were more low tech than they are now. Today they are extremely sophisticated. For the past year or so AudioXpress magazine has been running a fantastic series on loudspeakers designs and materials.
--Ethan
At minimum for both, the amplifier is far more complicated. Building a speaker is safe and can be accomplished by anyone who can read a schematic and operate a screw driver. Wiring up an amplifier incorrectly and you have a potentially lethal 120/240V catastrophe.
At maximum, I think it would tend to draw more evenly. Very few speaker manufacturers make use of all the various ways to effectively measure a speaker. But their lack of interest in that doesn't mean that it's not possible and require great skill and aptitude to use those measurements. Also consider that a speaker is both an electrical beast as well as a mechanical beast. And if you wanted, you could add fancy stuff such as fluid dynamics and what not. So a speaker CAN be as complicated as any amplifier. Even though most don't engage in that level of intellectual pursuit.
Then again, just because something CAN be complex doesn't mean that it needs to be. Ultimately, my favorite designers and the ones who I consider to be the smartest of all are the ones who's designs are actually quite simple in nature. The catch is that it takes the highest level of intellect to effectively make a simple design worker better than the complex.
After all....................
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
At maximum, I think it would tend to draw more evenly. Very few speaker manufacturers make use of all the various ways to effectively measure a speaker. But their lack of interest in that doesn't mean that it's not possible and require great skill and aptitude to use those measurements. Also consider that a speaker is both an electrical beast as well as a mechanical beast. And if you wanted, you could add fancy stuff such as fluid dynamics and what not. So a speaker CAN be as complicated as any amplifier. Even though most don't engage in that level of intellectual pursuit.
Then again, just because something CAN be complex doesn't mean that it needs to be. Ultimately, my favorite designers and the ones who I consider to be the smartest of all are the ones who's designs are actually quite simple in nature. The catch is that it takes the highest level of intellect to effectively make a simple design worker better than the complex.
After all....................
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
I like whart’s answer. Intellect aside, imo speaker designers have to be adept in many more disciplines. The best ones use bespoke drivers of their own design and mfr which makes the task of challenging for SOTA that much more monumental. same goes for cabinet and filter design, none of which are off the shelf and entirely separate disciplines unto themselves.
Conversely, the majority of electronics designers use non-proprietary off the shelf components of someone elses' mfr that can be breadboarded into a prototype fairly quickly, if we're talking about amplfiers as compared to an entire speaker system, the amp designer will have far fewer 'problems' to solve as it were.
Conversely, the majority of electronics designers use non-proprietary off the shelf components of someone elses' mfr that can be breadboarded into a prototype fairly quickly, if we're talking about amplfiers as compared to an entire speaker system, the amp designer will have far fewer 'problems' to solve as it were.
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