ProSoundWeb: The specification of a loudspeaker’s sensitivity is probably one of the most common, yet perhaps one of the most misunderstood. It’s common to see the magnitude response of a loudspeaker system reduced to a single number as a sensitivity rating. This is perhaps at the heart of the confusion.
3 comments:
I knew that achieving the sound you want to output is a very tricky thing to achieve, especially with the budget that is usually given for shows, with sound being one of the smallest components, at least in smaller theater houses. I can see that choice behind trying to minimize a speaker down to its sensitivity rating so that marketing can broadly say that this speaker is great to the widest audience who do not need to know what all behind a speaker and its intricacies is. There is a lot of specification that goes into selecting a speaker system to a space and what level of spectrum those speakers can reproduce.
Until now, I’ve never quite understood how sensitivity interacts with response or wattage, or really what sensitivity is in the first place. I definitely didn’t understand everything in this article, but I can at least say I have a much better grasp on what sensitivity is. The article focused mostly on the math and science behind a speaker’s sensitivity, but I would’ve liked to be able to learn more about how a sound designer uses this information when putting together a plan for a sound system. I’d also be interested in a deeper dive into how acoustic spaces are designed from the ground up, but that’s just a side thought from reading this article. I think that, at least at CMU, sound is often overlooked or dismissed because it is comparatively a smaller department. It’s easy to forget that sound can very easily be much more complicated than we might think.
This article was super cool and had a lot of information that I didn’t know. Sound is probably the technical area that I know the least about, so I always love to learn more. Also as an electrical engineer, I’ve taken courses about signals, signal processing, and lots of the math that is behind various signal processing and audio stuff, but the functional specs of sound systems is still something that I don’t know much about. There’s definitely a disconnect in my brain between the signal processing work that I’ve done and the specs that one would see on a spec sheet; reading an article that talks about and shows the graphs behind the specs is nice because it lets my brain start to connect those concepts. Reading about transfer functions and seeing DUT referenced in an article for my non-engineering courses gives me like war flashbacks to 18-290, but it’s also super cool to see these concepts in the “real world.”
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