Driver Responsiveness

Just as high-performance vehicles must articulate the road ahead through acceleration and cornering, loudspeakers must closely track the complexity of music waveforms. But how much priority is really given to acceleration in speaker component selection? Since articulation is key in the midrange band let’s examine the acceleration capabilities of a number of midrange speakers found in high-end speakers.

Below is the calculated air volume acceleration (AVA) of these eight premium transducers.

AVA = motor assembly force product (BL) divided by moving mass (MMS) multiplied by effective cone area (SD)

The top three drivers listed are used in Legacy speaker designs. You might recognize the other five esteemed drivers as they are found in numerous high-end designs.

Obviously Legacy speaker designs greatly emphasize the importance of acceleration with typically four times the acceleration volume of competitors.

AVA is directly linked to efficiency, dynamics and transient waveform tracing. This theme carries through the treble region with the dual AMT ribbon arrangement providing sixteen times the air volume displacement of a 1” dome tweeter.

See the full article, "Raising The Bar on Speaker Performance: A Loudspeaker Designer's Perspective" by Legacy Audio's Chief Designer, Bill Dudleston, on Secrets of Home Theater & High Fidelity, and later here on our site under Engineer's Perspectives.

“The eight requisite parameters of a truly great loudspeaker are wide bandwidth with solid bass foundation, uncompressed dynamics, proper timbre, transparency, spatial realism and waveform tracking ability with time coherence and room adaptability. A tall order, but with thoughtful design we can get there. “