Audio Engineering Explained

CHAPTER 12

Diversity of Design

 

Loudspeakers by Philip Newell and Keith Holland

 

Although the original moving-coil, cone loudspeaker of Rice and Kellogg was the first true loudspeaker of a type that we know today, it was, itself, a development of ideas which had gone before, principally relating to the design of telephone earpieces, which were not very loud speakers. The moving-coil direct radiator, along with amplifiers as great as 15 watts output — which was then huge — soon opened a door to room-filling sound levels, and, within only a couple of years, talking pictures at the cinema. The need to fill larger and larger theaters with sound led to horn designs, and the need for greater bandwidth led to the separation of the drive units into ...