Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Speaker tech terminology

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Speaker tech terminology

    So…. Supposedly, the big mod now for car stereo speakers is to add extra magnets on the back of the stock magnet - but they are placing a parchment-like barrier between the magnets to prevent damage. Anyone heard about this? And they have some term for the parchment they are using - don't know if it's a brand name, the actual name, or a street name. Ideas? The mod is intended to smooth out speaker response transients and increase power. Or is this all hokum?
    Act your age, not your shoe size. - Prince

  • #2
    All of a speakers components are engineered to work together to achieve a specific audio objective and changing just one, without the associated components, is not efficiently effective. This sounds like a "more is better", without an understanding of the related principals at play.

    Comment


    • #3
      I've used a lot of that technology for most of my life and I've never understood a dang bit of it. Kinda like you don't have to know how to drive the car without having built the car yourself.
      Last edited by pdub; May 31, 2019, 09:33 AM.
      Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

      Comment


      • #4
        Hokum? yeah, that's a good word for it.

        My fabulous web page

        "If it don't go, chrome it!" --Stroker McGurk

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by pdub View Post
          I've used a lot of that technology for most of my life and I've never understood a dang bit of it. Kinda like you don't have to know how to drive the car without having built the car yourself.
          Use without understanding how it works is common in everyday life, for everybody, with almost everything they touch. But .. modifying something without understanding, that has been researched, developed and produced in mass production by people a lot smarter, is just asking for problems.

          Comment


          • #6
            Okay - asked over on another forum, and got the lowdown from an old coot (my age) who reconed speakers at a radio shop long ago. Back in the 60's in a quest for loudness, someone tried this and found that it did not increase volume, but did indeed smooth out transient responses. It acted a bit like a neodymium magnet speaker would from these days.... So it was a high fidelity improvement, but made speaker cabs heavier than hell with twice the magnets. Some cheap cabs fell apart from the extra weight, so it fell out of favor. Now I wonder how the kids started using an old trick?
            Act your age, not your shoe size. - Prince

            Comment


            • #7
              I've been thinking about it and sleeping on it, trying to tie it in. I think I nearly can... At Gear Head Inn, when I backed that truck into there, folks swarmed around, wanting to help offload all of the equipment or load it back up. But when it came time to hook it all up and run those wires, they scattered. At that point I was on my own. Like, that was voodoo or something, the magic it requires to wire all of that stuff up and make it work. That, which has always been second nature to me.

              So everybody has different levels of experience and knowledge in lots of things. I can rig up this PA system and make it go but don't ask me to troubleshoot your car. Oh, and don't ask me to mix the sound that comes out of the PA worth a damn. That's another skill set entirely.

              Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

              Comment


              • #8
                All I know is the quest for bass is endless. Live sound you can throw 10 times the wattage into the bass cabinets and it just keeps getting better. Everything involved has a point of diminishing returns though. I loved my 18 inch cabinets. When 24s became available people flocked to them until they discovered how much wattage THAT required. Never forget a guy warming up the crowd with some recorded music and his 24s were sounding good. A stroll by the power rack and the bass amp was clipping out just playing music. Of course when the band started it was total mud and distortion on the bottom. Loved my 18s though.
                My hobby is needing a hobby.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by RockJustRock View Post
                  Loved my 18s though.
                  I've got 15's that were probably handmade out of 1-inch plywood so many years ago. They weigh a crap-ton. Even the stands for them weigh about 60 pounds. AND they're coned. I made wooden wedges to put into the horns to keep them from vibrating.

                  The cabinets I used at GHI are 12's. Plastic cabinets. Even I could throw them about ten feet if I was mad enough. It's amazing, the advances and changes in technology.
                  Last edited by pdub; May 31, 2019, 12:50 PM.
                  Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    boy - do I feel like a wuss! I only have 10s in the wagon.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      After another nap there may be another thread title - "Damn, But....." I shouda coulda taken the 50-foot snake to GHI to go along with the big sound board and set the board up out there by the fire pit. And recruited somebody to run sound. Anybody. It's just twisting knobs, what does it sound like? Suit yourself and it probably suits everyone else. It's impossible to know from the "stage" what it sounds like going to the crowd. The stage monitors are on a whole different channel.

                      Damn, but whoever checked into the motel after the setup would be driving their car over the snake..... not an ideal situation for the hardware. It would have been a great way for an un-used snake to die. Go ahead and do a burnout on top of it. Go out in flames.
                      Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Mixing is something that just seems intuitive. Just like sometimes you visit a friend and the settings on his stereo and even his TV are all messed up and he doesn't even realize but it drives you crazy. Either you can do it or you don't even understand. Beyond that there are tricks. Keep your channels on the high side and your masters low for reserve. My biggest trick was to do a sound check with monitors only seeing just how good I could get things to sound without the mains. The bringing up the mains was icing, the band was happy, the audience was happy, everyone was happy.
                        My hobby is needing a hobby.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by RockJustRock View Post
                          Mixing is something that just seems intuitive.
                          I made so many "studio" recordings, maybe more than some real bands ever did. Overdubbing tracks. And I did it technically backward from established theory. I would lay down the guitar and the vocal together on two tracks first, there's the song. My timing sucks, I always want to play faster and faster toward the end of the song. And then I'd backfill that with the bass and drums and whatever kind of racket. So any mistakes I made on the original two tracks, I inherently followed those mistakes with the rest of the instruments. So it got worse and worse. And at the end of the day I was left just thinking, no way I'm doing all of this over again.

                          All that to say, the "sound" ..... Same room, same equipment, same person on the knobs, they all "sounded" different and I never knew why or why not. Some even worse than others. The ones that came out sounding good must have been an accident that I couldn't re-create.

                          Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            It all reminds me of how much fun we had at GHI. We'll never be able to do that again, but man was that ever fun. Some of the things you do, you only realize later how much fun that was. GHI was one of those deals where you knew at that very moment you were having fun.

                             
                            Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

                            Comment

                            Working...
                            X