#30 in a series of articles about the technology behind Bang & Olufsen loudspeakers
from www.recordere.dk when they visited Struer for the BeoLab 20 launch.
#30 in a series of articles about the technology behind Bang & Olufsen loudspeakers
from www.recordere.dk when they visited Struer for the BeoLab 20 launch.
Mattias says:
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to part 2!
I guess the “complain-fix-complain-fix” cycle could go on forever. What is the limiting factor? Is it typically constraints in time, cost, manufacturing capabilities, engineering or something else, or is it different from speaker to speaker?
Millemissen says:
The title of the video is incorrect – we are seeing a BL20.
Wonder if Recordere.dk could fix that.
geoff says:
MM – yes – it was the BL20 launch – but most of the story would be the same. The only difference was that, back then, the focus was on frequency response rather than time response, since the processing was done with analogue filters rather than in DSP.
Cheers
-geoff
geoff says:
Hi,
As you guessed, the limiting factor is different from loudspeaker to loudspeaker. In a best case, we run out of physical things-to-fix, since it turns out that the thing I’m complaining about has something to do with the relationship between the on-axis magnitude response and the 3D power response – which means that the “fix” is really a sound design issue, and not an acoustical measurement issue. Sometimes, the DSP solution is the smarter one, since the physical fix has side effects that make it the wrong answer to the problem. (For example, internal resonances can be reduced by filling up the enclosure with absorption, but this may reduce the efficiency of the cooling of the internal components, which will, in turn, limit the maximum output. So, it’s smarter to “undo” them with DSP filtering rather than acoustical absorption.)
Of course, sometimes, the correction can only be made physically (i.e. changing a component, a material, or the construction of the loudspeaker), and so we do it. In serious cases, this can even mean a delay in the date that we release the loudspeaker for sale. This, of course, would be a very serious decision that involves a lot of factors – but it has happened in the past – but not often. An example of this is described in this posting.
Cheers
-geoff