Coaxial Speakers

If a car owner were to step into a store that sold car speakers, then he or she might find that speakers had been placed on the storeroom floor. Such speakers would probably be coaxial speakers, the type of speakers that have been purchased most frequently.

What explains the fact that a great many of the sales of speakers involve coaxial speakers? A look inside the coaxial speaker fails to provide the answer. The insides of all coaxial speakers contain a midrange/woofer and a tweeter. The tweeter is located in one of two places: on a bridge over the speaker cone or on a pole that extends from the middle of the speaker cone.

The popularity of coaxial speakers is largely due to their low cost. In addition coaxial speakers are easy to install. Coaxial speakers allow a car owner to purchase a speaker at a bargain price, and coaxial speakers can be wired into the car with minimal effort. Coaxial speakers also offer one other advantage; coaxial speakers operate like a “point source,” i.e. like having all of a room’s sound frequencies coming from a single source.

Unfortunately coaxial speakers can also deliver a low quality sound. Still the car owner can prevent the sound quality from coaxial speakers from falling to an intolerably low level. The car owner must get all of the facts from the car speaker salesman. The car owner must ask the salesman certain questions.

A car owner should want to learn the frequency response of any coaxial speaker on the showroom floor. The frequency response indicates how much of the range of audible sounds a speaker can create. Yet knowledge of a speaker’s frequency response fails to provide a car owner with all of the important speaker facts. The car owner should also ask about any speaker’s power handling.

The car owner must stay alert to possible tricks employed by the speaker salesperson. For example, the car owner might be given the speaker’s peak power handling instead of its continuous or RMS (root mean square) power handling. The car owner should also be aware of the distance that he or she stands from a speaker prior to making a purchase. The car owner should listen to any of the coaxial speakers at a distance of 1 meter. The car owner can best test a speaker’s sensitivity by listening to it at a distance of 1 meter.