What You Need to Know About Portable Speaker Drivers

Are you planning on buying a portable speaker ？Before you do that, it is better to know a few things about this gadget. One of them is the driver. Some people still think that the round thing on the speaker is the speaker itself. But, that is not true. That part is actually called as a driver. Learning about portable speaker drivers will help you to choose the right one with top-quality sound. Thus, let’s dig some more information about this part.

Speaker Driver Types

There are three types of speaker drivers you need to know. Those are tweeter, woofer, and midrange. Each of them produces different frequencies or tones. That includes bass or low and treble or

Woofer
In term of size, the woofer is the biggest driver installed in a speaker. It is specially designed in that way so it can reproduce low frequency or also known as bass. The frequencies it can generate is below 200Hz. Some drivers in this type has the ability to produce mid-range frequencies as well. But, that only happens when it is combined with the tweeter or another woofer. Compared to the other types of driver, this one does most of the work in a speaker such as sound effects, voices, and musical instruments played in a song.
Tweeter
You can say that tweeter is the opposite of woofer. This driver is much smaller than other units. And, it can reproduce high frequencies or treble. Its frequency capability is above 2000Hz. In some cases, the tweeter is even able to generate sounds which are impossible for the human ear to hear directly. We still can sense those sounds, though. This driver is divided into several types. Those are a cone, dome, piezo, ribbon, and electrostatic.

Midrange
Some speaker usually come with both tweeter and woofer. It aims to offer the speaker users to choose any frequency ranges they like. However, to make speakers more convenient to use, a third driver is designed, and that is the mid-range driver. As you can guess by its name, it is capable of reproducing mid-range frequencies. The range it can handle is between 200Hz to 2000Hz. Moreover, this driver can separate the low and mid-range frequencies.

How Speaker Driver Works

The material used for speaker driver cone is usually from metal, paper, or plastic. Whichever the material is, all of them work in the same way. They do back and forth movement and then create some changes to the air pressure. This process will come to your eardrum and make it to move back and forth too. This correspondence is the one that makes you can hear the sounds from the speaker.

About the high and low of the frequency, it depends on the size of the driver. The bigger it is, the lower sound it can reproduce. In contrast, the smaller the size is, the higher the sound it can generate. That’s why tweeter (small driver) has high frequency, while woofer (big driver) has a lower one.

Portable Speaker Types Based on Driver

There are two common types of portable speaker based on its driver. First, the two-way speaker is a speaker that has two drivers at once, woofer and tweeter. Second, the three-way speaker has all the three drivers, which are woofer, tweeter, and midrange. Now some of you might think that 3-way speaker is much better than 2-way. That is such a misleading thought. In fact, there are some 2-way speakers have much better sound quality than 3-way speakers.

Finally

That’s all the things you need to know about portable speaker drivers. As you can see, drivers are really important parts in a speaker. Once you have learned about it, you will know which speaker you need to buy. Before buying, do not forget to test the sound first.