Speakers are all around us in our modern world. Everywhere from your iPod, your TV, your computer and even in your phone. They are the modern messenger.
But how do they in fact work? Are they really complicated? Not really. Let’s have a closer look about how do speakers actually work !
To be able to understand how a speaker works, we need to understand how sound itself works. Sound is basically air vibrations. When air vibrates it creates sound waves.
So when you talk, your voice creates air vibrations which moves the air particles in your mouth. When one air particle vibrates, it will cause the particle next to it to vibrate as well, causing a domino effect of air particles.
When these sound waves reaches your ear, your eardrum will vibrate and send a signal to the brain to be decoded. And that is how we hear sounds.
Now that we have a decent grasp on sound, we can see how a speaker works.
A speaker takes electronical signals from your computer, TV, iPod and translates it into sound. When those signals have been decoded and have reached the speaker things start to happen.
There are two magnets inside a speaker. One of them is wrapped in a wire with electricity running through the wire. We call this magnet an electromagnet, because we can alter whether or not it is positively or negatively charged.
So when the speaker has decoded the signal from the pc, it will start vibrating and create sound. The way it does that is by constantly reversing the flow of electricity. The electromagnet will be positvely charged, then negatively, and so on. At one point it is attracted to the other magnet, causing the speaker cone to move down, then it suddenly changes and the electromagnet is repelled by the other magnet. Meaning the speaker cone will move up. This happens several times a second causing the vibrations we see from a speaker.
Perhaps you have found yourself in a situation where you couldn’t resist touching a speaker playing music. I certainly have dropped to the temptation and tried it. You can easily feel the vibrations. We are talking about hundreds of vibrations a second, which is quite impressive.
When the speaker makes this up and down movement it creates vibrations in the air particles in front of it. And as we have learned, this leads to a domino effect of air particles moving in every direction. If one of these sound waves hits your eardrum your brain is able to decode the sound, and then you hear the pure sound coming from the speaker. All of this happens in a fraction of a second, it happens so fast it’s hard to wrap our hear around it, but it is in fact the case.
So lets take the easy route and sum it up. A electrical signal is sent from the PC or TV to the speaker, which decodes it. The magnets inside the speaker are them rapidly attracted and repelled to one another, causing the vibrations we feel when we touch a speaker. This vibrations move air particles and creates a sound wave. When those sound waves hits our eardrum we can hear the sound like it should be.
