Amps and speakers, not guitar, just amps and speakers question, but just how it works , and stuff.

robgilmo

So I was wondering, some amps dont open out until a certain volume is reached. Not valve amps though, nothing to do with valve amps.
I have also noticed some speakers dont open up until a ceretain volume is achieved , by an amp , which isnt a valve amp, we arnt even thinking of them by now..

So I was wondering, is this an amp thing, or , a speaker thing, or , how each relate to eachother? and no , its not a valve thing, not in the slightest, how about you buy yourself a kitten instead?

maharg101

Fletcher Munsen

HAL9000

I don’t know but have always assumed that there’s a point below which the amp isn’t really pushing the speaker hard enough to do its job properly. 

ICBM

Most speakers don’t need to be ‘pushed’ to sound good - but some do. The difference is in how stiff the edge surround of the cone is - some speakers have a much stiffer surround, usually because the paper is ‘doped’ (the sticky varnish you can often feel around the edge) - the V30 is probably the best example. This does make them a bit harsh and flat-sounding until they get enough power to overcome this. Speakers without this, and also when they get old and very well broken-in, don’t need that extra power to make the cone move easily so they sound fine right down to a whisper.

Hi-fi and monitor speakers almost always have a soft foam or thin rubber edge surround exactly for this reason, to make them as easy to drive at tiny amounts of input power as possible.

paulmapp8306

as @maharg101 says - Fletcher Munsen.   It sore to do with your ears and how they perceive frequencies at different volumes than the amps.

While some speakers do like to be pushed hard - as ICBM says - thats more about how they start to compress and distort themselves, the FM issue is much more noticeable.

exocet

There's also the acoustic coupling effect where sound produced by speakers begins to vibrate the strings but before loud enough to escalate into screaching feedback.

blobb

From a hifi perspective, Mr loudspeaker himself, Alan Harbeth talks about design philosophy etc...

Danny1969

It used to be common for Hi Fi's to have a loudness button, which basically boosted the bass and upper treble by quite a bit. The idea was it sounded louder because we don't detect these frequencies so well at low volume. 

Probably not a popular opinion but a lot of people spend a fair bit of money on power attenuators which won't ever get their amp to sound like a fully cranked amp because the amount of air moved, the resonance between the guitar and amp at high volume and the actual speaker cone distorting all contribute massively to that sound. 

You can get the power valves cooking and the output transformer saturating but that's not the same thing. Before the sanity of mic;ing up in the early nineties I did loads of gigs with a 100 watt Marshall cranked right up, it's a totally different experience to an amp cranked into an attenuator. 

robgilmo

I never thought about it being my ears and Eq, I thought it was more to do with matching the speaker to the amp.