Category Archives: Audio 101

The Audio 101 series articles.

Audio 101 – Crossovers

In the last few articles, I talked about frequency response, on/off axis response, and the various types of drivers you’ll come across when designing speaker systems. Today, I bring some of that together and talk about crossovers. Crossovers are a critical part of a system design, and being able to understand the different types of crossovers as well as the functions they serve will be pivotal to your ability to create a solid system.

Continue reading Audio 101 – Crossovers

Audio 101 – Types of Speaker Drivers

Today, I’m going to get down to the basics, as I need to cover a few fundamentals before we move on to our next topic. In this article, I’m going to briefly discuss the basic differences between the types of speaker drivers commonly available; tweeters, mids, woofers, subwoofers, and full-range drivers. Each of these serves a specific purpose in reproducing parts of the frequency range.

Continue reading Audio 101 – Types of Speaker Drivers

Audio 101 – On/Off Axis Response

Last week, we started the Audio 101 series by explaining frequency response and how it relates to the music that we hear. This week, we’ll build on that and discuss on-axis and off-axis response. It will be important to understand the nature of axis response if we are to design a car or home audio system that will sound good to us. If you have not yet read the article on frequency response, it is recommended that you start there.

Continue reading Audio 101 – On/Off Axis Response

Audio 101 – Frequency Response

This article begins my series on understanding audio systems. This seems to be a bit of an advanced topic for many people, and I’ve had a lot of people ask me questions about it throughout the last couple of years. I’ve also come to realize that more advanced articles may be difficult to understand without a fundamental understanding of technical concepts. The understanding of a few of these technical and fundamental concepts related to audio will help you make more intelligent and informed purchasing and design decisions for both home and car audio. It is assumed that you already have a basic understanding of sound waves.  Today, we’ll start with frequency response.

Continue reading Audio 101 – Frequency Response