Speaker Tech

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Brent Butterworth | Feb 23, 2014

Dr. Poh Hsu has a doctorate in civil engineering from MIT, but his passion for audio and experiments in subwoofer design led him to found his own speaker company in 1991. His subs quickly earned a reputation for high output, outstanding sound quality and great value, and he’s still at it today. Excerpts from this interview appear in the feature story “Subwoofers: The Guts and the Glory.”

S&V: What do you believe are the major determiners of subwoofer sound quality? Driver? Amp? Loading? Enclosure? DSP tuning? Etc.

PH: It is how they are all designed to work together synergistically. No one factor stands out.

S&V: What drives your decision to go with sealed, ported, or passive radiator loading in a particular sub? Is one or the other particularly suited for a certain environment...

Speaker Tech

Andrew Welker, R&D Manager, Axiom Audio

Brent Butterworth | Feb 23, 2014

Andrew Welker is a mainstay of the Canadian speaker engineering community, now heading up most of the design work for Axiom audio after a dozen years working on the Mirage and Energy brands at Audio Products International (since purchased by Klipsch and VOXX International).Excerpts from this interview appear in the feature story “Subwoofers: The Guts and the Glory.”

S&V: What’s the most important aspect of a subwoofer: the driver, the enclosure, or the amplifier?
AW: I don’t think there’s any one thing that makes a good subwoofer. A major determiner is that the design is balanced, so everything’s made to work together. To say the driver is most important, well, I can make a woofer that handles 1,000 watts all day long, but if I stick it in a cabinet that doesn’t load it properly, there’s no point in having that glorious woofer in the system.

Speaker Buying Tips Speaker Tech

Just the Facts: Speaker Shopping & Tech Tips

Rob Sabin | Oct 25, 2012

Looking for that perfect set of speakers? Before you hit the stores, here’s everything you need to know in a quick-read format. See our Top Picks for Floorstanding and Compact Speakers and Subwoofers.

Custom Installation How-To Speaker Setup Speaker Tech

How To Install In-Wall Speakers

HT Staff | Dec 08, 2011

If you’re reasonably handy and not afraid to cut into drywall in your home, installing in-wall speakers can be a fairly simple affair. You’ll need to assemble the basic tools, including a drywall saw, a stud finder, an electrical snake or fiberglass push rods to run the wires, a tape measure, a drill with a long bit wide enough to pass your speaker wire, and a screwdriver, most typically a No. 2 Phillips.

Audio Separates Buying Tips AV Receiver Buying Tips AV Receiver Setup AV Receiver Tech Speaker Buying Tips Speaker Setup Speaker Tech

How to Choose a Home Theater for Movies or Music

Steve Guttenberg | Aug 25, 2011

Selecting audio components is one of the more daunting tasks that any serious home theater enthusiast faces. On the surface, it seems evident that if you just go out and buy the best components you can afford, they’ll sound great with both movies and music. And that’s generally true: A better system will more accurately reproduce the waveforms you feed it, irrespective of whether they come from a movie or music. But it’s often not that simple. While assembling a home theater system that’s equally spectacular with movies and music may be a laudable goal, unless you have unlimited funds, you’ll probably have compromises to make. At that point, you might want to steer the system’s performance strengths one way or the other with the right mix of speakers and electronics. But how do you go about matching these up?

Speaker Buying Tips Speaker Setup Speaker Tech

HT Guide to Speakers

Mark Fleischmann | Mar 17, 2011

Home theater has transformed loudspeakers in nearly the same way it transformed TV. As screens have gotten bigger, the stereo soundstage has expanded into a surround soundfield. Wall-mounted HDTVs can now mate with in-wall, on-wall, or soundbar speakers. Even the higher performance of HDTV finds an analog in lossless surround for movies and music.

Speaker Tech

Speaker Technology Primer

Thomas J. Norton | Aug 10, 2007

Speakers are available in a bewildering variety of styles, sizes, and technologies. On the technical side, the vast majority are conventional box designs using one or more drivers—most commonly a single cone woofer for the bass and midrange, a single dome tweeter for the treble, and a crossover network to divide and route the appropriate frequencies to each. The speaker cabinet, or box, which can be either a sealed or ported design, is not merely a cosmetic touch; it is a key element in the design. Without a properly designed cabinet, even the best conventional woofer would simply flap in its own breeze and produce little or no bass.

Bookshelf Speaker Reviews Speaker Setup Speaker Tech

Backyard Bonanza

Darryl Wilkinson | Jul 31, 2001 | First Published: Aug 01, 2001

Put away that charcoal. Here's a different kind of grille for your patio.

My, how times have changed. Back when vinyl records were king and a 25-inch-diagonal TV screen was considered big, here's how you had a good time in the backyard: a keg of beer, burgers on a charcoal grill, and your roommate's big, ugly speakers (carted out from the living room) blasting Rush (Geddy Lee, et al) until the conservative neighbors call the cops. A decade or so goes by, and the fun gets more sophisticated: a cooler of imported beer (maybe a margarita machine), steaks on a gas grill, and a big, ugly boombox belting out Rush (Limbaugh) until the liberal neighbors call the cops. Today, it's likely to be takeout from a local BBQ joint, a mini-fridge full of hard lemonade, and steam from the hot tub mingling with big-band music from outdoor speakers hidden somewhere in the (twice-monthly manicured) foliage.

Speaker Tech

Bass-ic Training

HT Staff | Jul 18, 2000 | First Published: Jul 19, 2000

Do you want your home theater system to have that "sucker punches in your gut" feel you got at your local cinema when T-Rex stomped his way through San Diego? Do you need your pant legs to flap with each bass line, just as they did at the recent Metallica concert? Want to be as emotionally attached to the recorded version of Beethoven's Fifth as when you heard the cellos and timpani pound out that familiar triplet live at the concert hall? Would you like James Earl Jones' voice-over for CNN to sound less like Mickey Mouse and more like, well, Darth Vader? If so, it's time for you to invest in a subwoofer.

Speaker Tech

Face Off: Surround-Speaker-Configuration Wars

Mike Wood | Apr 28, 2000 | First Published: Apr 29, 2000

The struggle continues: single versus dual speakers; dipoles versus monopoles.

Lightsabers swirl all around, machines explode to the side, and lasers come from directly behind you. If you saw The Phantom Menace in a Dolby Digital Surround EX-equipped theater, you heard one of the more spatially realistic soundtracks recorded to date. Now, that same technology has entered the home market under the moniker THX Surround EX (non-THX-certified products might refer to a similar process as 6.1), and a familiar question returns to haunt us: Should you use dipole or monopole (also known as direct-radiating) loudspeakers for the back channel? This time around, the question comes with a new twist: Should you use one or two speakers for this channel? Willing to conquer any challenge and answer any question, we at Home Theater took it upon ourselves to test various speaker configurations. After describing the process itself and the advantages and disadvantages of dipole and monopole speakers, we'll let you know what our panel of judges thought of the various options.

Speaker Tech

Speaker Measurements 101

Brent Butterworth | Aug 30, 2013

The advent of cheap audio measurement gear has made it easy for do-it-yourselfers to tweak their systems and even test their own speakers and amps. Unfortunately, it has also spawned a new generation of would-be technicians doing really bad speaker measurements.

Speaker Tech

Frequency Response: A Show and Tell

Brent Butterworth | Oct 03, 2011

I often worry that people get the wrong idea when I praise a speaker for sounding "flat." By this I mean its frequency response is flat, which is a good thing. But if you ask the man on the street, I bet he'd equate flat sound with lifeless sound.

It's high time I explained what frequency response is and why flat frequency response is desirable in audio products. Not only will I explain why non-flat response is bad, I'll demonstrate it to you with some audio files I cooked up just for this article.

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