Difference Between 10" and 12"

[cotjones 10+ year member]

Some other members and i have been arguing about this whole transient response thing in another thread. In that thread, thadman stated that differences in subs' transient responses are inaudible because the panels in a vehicle resonate for a while after the original note plays. True story?

this is wat i said... he spent a long time replying that i'm an idiot...

the problem though is that the sound that resonates on the panels is a reflection of the signal that comes directly from the sub... so if you start with an inaccurate sound the resonance or continuing vibration will continue to sound inaccurate. if you start with an accurate signal, then it will continue to be accurate... so basically if the transient reponse sucks, yes it will sound bad and will make a difference.... so you say well hey it's moving 60 times a second, you won't be able to hear the difference right? wrong.

thats like saying 60 and 61 htz are the same, to your ear they might sound indistinguishable, but to some they don't. the fact is you do hear all of that, even though you don't have the ability to focus on everything you hear (IE: can you write down a symphony after hearing it?) there are a few who can, probably about .0001 percent of the population or less ...but you still HEAR it all... small variations in transient responce greatly affect the accuracy of the sub... thats why some subs are more suited for SPL while some subs are better suited for SQ with the same power handleing...

 

[helotaxi 5,000+ posts]

ok so if you take a sub's nominal impedance then subtract the other factors that leaves you with inductance right?

No. It might give you an idea about the inductance but not tell you what it is.

Break. Break.

There are two ways you could look at the question, I guess. One is impulse and decay response. MLSSA waterfall plot type stuff. Mass, cone stiffness, suspension compliance, enclosure design, enclosure construction, temperature, humidity and almost anything imaginable will affect the decay and the actual response of the impulse output.

The other way to look at this is coil movement. If the cone and suspension and the rest are up to snuff, then we are back to this and it is a product of inductance. The coil moves with the signal its is presented minus the losses and delays caused be inductance. Small signal, this is pretty much where it's at. Once you get into large signal, cone breakup and so forth start to rear their ugly head.

Real world, every driver has a limit. Reach that limit and the results are unpleasant. Drive a sub into breakup and it will sound like poo. This could be seen as a limitation of transient response because it will muddy up the sound. It would, IMO, be more realistically be seen as driving a sub past its limit of audible distortion. Obviously different subs have different limits. If a smaller sub is built adequately and the manufacturer simply increases the cone size without addressing the need for increased cone rigidity and suspension damping, the larger driver will sound much more sloppy. That is a flaw in a design, not a basis for an across the board generalization, yet it is the foundation for the myth of smaller drivers being "quicker" than larger ones. If the sub is built correctly for its size and mass, inductance becomes the real deciding factor.