January 2025

New Speaker Priorities
How many new loudspeakers are now being designed.
Editorial By J. Martins

  Many brilliant speaker engineers I know, particularly those more actively involved in the industry, have in common a shared understanding of the limitations and strong compromises needed to create products that actually reach consumers. They are fully aware that the speaker is the weakest link in the sound chain and that its efficiency is lower than anything they dare to discuss. Paradoxically, they all share a profound belief in their mission to achieve performance gains according to the intended application of their work – with listening performance being the ultimate goal, albeit with the inevitable compromises.

But performance can be an elusive metric, depending on the intended application goals of the finished product. A speaker driver is just a component in a loudspeaker system design, as Vance Dickason reminded us in his recently (re)published text about the purpose of his Test Bench characterizations. "Whether a particular driver ends up sounding good or bad to a large extent depends on the application and the skill set of the systems engineer designing the product. Seriously, I have made some pretty pedestrian (read that severely mediocre) transducers I was required to incorporate into a system design come out sounding very, very good..."

That's a notion shared by all speaker systems engineers, and that's why they appreciate Vance's Test Bench as an objective outline of the raw performance of the drivers, and not his opinion of their "usefulness" or a critique of the design tradeoffs made by the manufacturers. "...to do that, I would have to design the transducer into a system," he adds.

That's precisely why I cringe when I see loudspeaker attributes described as "pure hi-fi sound" and the "ultimate audio realism," "free of any artificial coloration," and praised for the wide and deep soundstage, with a neutral response," and the "integrity of the sound waves." Some of those sentences can actually be found in the marketing of loudspeakers costing $40 or $400K, as well as to describe the performance of headphones, amplifiers... or cables.

The first question on my mind when analyzing a new product, particularly a new transducer, is the design goals, before getting into the performance gains. And I say this because I have seen a shift in those goals, and the audio industry embracing new performance metrics.

In the examples featured in this issue's Market Update, I picked real innovation efforts that aren't necessarily perceived by actual consumers. We have all witnessed the demise of many valid efforts and actual innovations that remained unrecognized and/or misunderstood, because technology and technical merit doesn't necessarily translate into actual products. I have also included examples of innovations where one of the intended design goals includes energy savings and efficiency, as well as sustainability. These are extremely important "performance gains," but I'm afraid not yet something that consumers are aware of or concerned about when selecting loudspeakers.

And as I mentioned, there are new use cases that require innovation focused on applicability. We now have a new category of "adaptable" home audio speakers that are used simultaneously for communications, listening to music, and are also part of the home theater or living room entertainment system. They need to deliver intelligible voice during a call and also maximize the impact with movies and Dolby Atmos soundtracks. And the same drivers must deliver on the ability to switch instantly from stereo to immersive formats, with speakers placed anywhere in the room, including different heights/distances from the listeners. These speakers have built-in microphones and are "room aware" so they can adjust the response accordingly to what the user selects. And the "magic" is obviously the result of very powerful signal processing, which requires drivers that are fully able to adjust the response in extreme ways – a completely new briefing for a transducer designer used to optimize a speaker to a limited set of parameters. But a very common challenge these days.

That's how many new speakers are now being designed, not to mention that they are increasingly conditioned by very specific form factors – such as incredibly compact and slim soundbars. All that is common today, and consequently requires rethinking performance metrics according to applicability requirements. In the process, innovation remains more important than ever.

J. Martins
Editor-in-Chief

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