Pioneer Car Speakers

Were Oliver Sachs assigned the task of searching on the Internet for information about Pioneer car speakers, he would no doubt devote much of his time to a study of the details about the speaker magnets. It appears that each of the Pioneer car speakers contains one of two types of materials.

The majority of the Pioneer car speakers contain strontium, an alkaline earth metal. Strontium represents a metal of choice for the manufacture of ferrite magnets, also known as ceramic magnets. Strontium magnets have one big advantage over iron magnets; they allow for the storage of stronger magnetic fields. Strontium magnets are the most commonly used radio magnets.

Because strontium magnets facilitate the storage of large amounts of magnetic force, they can give the Pioneer car speakers lots of power. However, the manufacture of strontium magnets requires a laborious and time-consuming procedure. The ferrite powder that is used in those magnets must be heated to the point where the particles of powder begin to adhere together.

Perhaps a desire to avoid the expense of that painstaking manufacturing process led the makers of Pioneer car speakers to initiate the use of neodymium magnets. Neodymium is a rare earth metal that was discovered by the chemist Carl Auer von Welshach in the 19th Century. By 1925 manufacturers had found a way to separate the neodymium from either monazite sand or Misch metal. Development of that separation process led to the manufacture of the neodymium magnets.

Neodymium has now found greater acceptance among the manufacturers of powerful and permanent magnets. Still, neodymium magnets do display one unfortunate characteristic. Neodymium magnets show a braking effect when they are in the vicinity of aluminum metal. In other words, placing aluminum close to any of the Pioneer car speakers could lower the quality of the sound from those speakers.

When magnets encounter a braking effect then, if those magnets are in a rotating field, they will rotate more slowly. The rotation of magnets is vital to the conversion of electrical energy into another form of energy, such as sound energy. The transducer in a Pioneer car speaker will not function properly in the presence of aluminum. That fact should explain to any car owner why Pioneer car speakers are not made from aluminum.