Reply To: The airDRIVE Paradox

[Ted Fletcher]

Yes, it’s all very interesting, and the waveform at the amplifier of course gives a perfect picture of how the loudspeaker is performing, but as with so many of these sorts of ideas, the world has moved on in other directions and modern (2015) ‘neo’ loudspeakers can perform remarkably well with voltage drive.

There is also a fallacy that I uncovered a couple of years ago; the current drive is OK and works perfectly except at the point of cone resonance, there, the theory seems to go out of the window and it’s possible to get some strange ‘undamped’ effects. But on balance, it’s still my preferred way to drive a loudspeaker with an analogue amplifier. Unfortunately, it’s not at all easy to implement it with a digital amp!

Nowadays we are using some very fine PWM (so called ‘digital’) amplifiers because they make economic sense….. ah well! 😥