Car speaker basics
Some people think a 200 watt speaker will be louder than a 100 watt speaker, the greater the amplifier’s power the louder will be the sound. This isn’t necessarily so.
Speakers are the single most important part of a vehicle’s sound system and their installation should only be done by experienced installers. To get good sound you must have a good speaker system. But what makes a good speaker system? To answer this we need to look first at what sound is.
Sound theory
Sound consists of vibrations which travel through air. These vibrations are transmitted by compression and refraction waves, and sounds are heard when these waves reach the ear. Whether deep or high-pitched noises are heard depends on the frequency of the vibrations. The very lowest sound frequency which the human ear can detect is about 20 Hertz (or in other words, 20 vibration waves per second). At the other end of the scale a young person can hear frequencies of up to 20,000 Hertz (20 kilohertz). Twenty Hz is the deepest rumbling sound of an earthquake, while 20,000 Hz is the highest of screams which shatter glass.
Unlike other sound reproducers like cassettes, a CD player (and its amplifier) can reproduce sound all the way from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Speakers produce the pressure variations in the air by vibrating their cones back and forth. A speaker cone vibrating 1000 times per second produces a sound frequency of 1000 Hz. One vibrating twice as fast produces a higher pitched sound. When reproducing music the speaker’s cone changes very rapidly in its vibrating frequency as it produces all the different sounds. The loudness of the sound produced depends not on how quickly the speaker’s cone vibrates but how far the cone moves. So a loud, deep bass note requires the speaker to vibrate only relatively slowly (only say 50 times per second) but to have a fairly great cone excursion.