Academy
Boiling voice coils? Is it possible?
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In this episode of #DynaudioAskTheExpert 🔊 we're going to explain exactly how and why. Let's turn up the heat! 🔥
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After. Wouldn't it? Okay, let's just pretend. One more nerdy question. How hot can a voice coil get? So for some reason, this is a question I've received a lot lately, and I'm not really sure why, but it's an interesting question we often talk about in our loudspeakers how the voice coils are designed for good heat dissipation. You know, it's important to get the heat away from the voice coil. So people will ask me, well, how big of an issue is that? Actually, how hot can the voice call you get? Our speakers have been designed so that the voice coil can get more than 100 degrees without any sort of damage. And so you can ask, does that actually happen? Well, the voice call can easily get up to 200 degrees if you overdriving your loudspeaker. What typically happens is the voice coil gets so hot that the lacquer on the voice coil starts boiling, and that means that it has reached those temperatures of around 200 degrees, which is like 6.5 million Fahrenheit. I have no idea. So that will basically ruin the driver, other than whether the speaker actually breaks or not. This phenomenon called power compression, which is quite important in the design of a loudspeaker. So power compression is what happens when the voice coil heats up. Then the material actually has more resistance. And more resistance means that when you put power into it, it will become hotter, it will turn more of the energy into heat, and that lowers the sensitivity of the loudspeaker. So when the voice call is hot, it's not actually playing as loud as it's supposed to. And this is quite important to how a loudspeaker sounds, especially when you're playing loud. One of the small secrets to how we design our loudspeakers at an audio is we try to balance the power compression between the speakers. So if you have a tweeter and a woofer, you want them to sound similar when you are driving them in power. And if you are playing loud, then typically the woofer will receive more power than the tweeter. And it also normally starts power compression earlier than the Twitter does. If you have a woofer that's power compressing, then it will not play as loud and then the tweeter will keep going if it doesn't have any power compression, and that means that the sound will be skewed. Now you have more tweeter level than than woofer level. So so now the sound will be harsh because of that imbalance in how they are compressing. So this combined with how it actually sounds different types of drivers will sound differently when you are overdriving them. That really changes how the speaker behaves when you're pushing them towards the limit. So that's that's part of the secret for for audio is how to make them natural sounding, even though you are reaching the limits of the loudspeaker. So the question is why does it get hot in the first place? So basically that's because Einstein says so. If you imagine an electric kettle that is basically a coil of wire that you put power into, and when you put power into the the wire, it heats up, which then heats up the water. Well, a loudspeaker actually works quite similarly. It is a coil of wire. When we put power into that, it creates a magnetic field that makes the speaker move. But because speakers are actually quite inefficient, more than 90% of that power is turned into heat, and only the rest of it, less than 10%, is turned into sound. That's actually quite significant. So. So whenever you're driving your speakers, a lot of that power turns into heat that heats up the voice coil. So that's why it's important to dissipate that heat.