Before it is really possible to understand how speakers work, it is first necessary to understand how sound works.

How Sound Works

Humans are able to pick up sound due to a very thin piece of tissue in their ear that is commonly known as the eardrum. When the sound waves reach the eardrum, it vibrates and sends signals to the brain, from there the brain can then interpret the vibration as sound.

Although sound vibrations can travel through liquid and solid objects, it most often travels through air, which is how people experience sound from speakers. The way this works is that the sound waves vibrate air particles; at this point the air particles move particle disturbance through the air. The vibrating air particles send a fluctuating wave of pressure through the atmosphere until it reaches your eardrum. As the eardrum vibrates, it sends the sound signals to your brain.

How Speakers Work

When sound is recorded with a microphone or other recording device, is works much like the eardrum; it picks up the sound vibrations and converts them into electrical signals, and then either records it as data, or sends it to the speaker.

When electrical signals are sent to a speaker, what is happening is that the speaker is converting those electrical signals back into physical vibrations that will create sound waves. If the system is working correctly, the sound that comes out of the speakers will be nearly identical to the sound that went into the microphone or recording.

The speaker translates the electrical signal when it rapidly vibrates a flexible cone, and a signal is sent through the voice coil. To amplify the sound, it is constantly fluctuating the electrical current between a positive and negative charge. This moves the voice coil back and forth, which then vibrates the cone to recreate the sound waves that reach your ears.

Because the different speakers create difference sound frequencies, to recreate high quality sound it is necessary to have different types of speakers; this is why you will find that most good speakers have a woofer and a tweeter, all within the same compartment.

When looking for high quality speakers, it is important to pay attention to the design of the speaker enclosure. The design of the speaker enclosure will influence the final output; you will want an enclosure that provides good quality sound reproduction.

The most popular is the sealed enclosure, which is completely sealed and forces the sound out from the speakers into the room. The disadvantage of the sealed speaker enclosure is that it is not as efficient as some of the other designs, and requires a boost in the electrical signal to produce good sound, as there is no method of equalizing the air pressure.

Other speaker enclosures, such as the bass reflex enclosure, or the passive radiator enclosure are designed to overcome the air pressure by redirecting it out of a small port that is built into the speaker.

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When it comes to setting up electronics equipment, there is a certain art to the procedure that people in the know can practice with differing results, and there is a science as well that is necessary (and not easy, for some people) to understand in order to accomplish good results.  Knowing how to set up audio equipment is a good example: it is very common for people to buy speaker systems, take them home, and then have absolutely no clue how to properly arrange the speakers, connect them, and configure the most remotely complex audio system—no matter how many times over they read the manual.  Between understanding what the difference between a subwoofer and a tweeter is and comprehending what causes sound interference and what a crossover is, there is a lot to learn for the average person looking to properly configure their home speaker system.

There are a few things that need to be understood about speaker equipment for someone to be able to have the foggiest clue of where to put things and what is necessary.  First of all, if what you’re looking for is truly high fidelity sound with plenty of amplification capacity, you need to go with a 4-way system—and what does that mean?  Sound travels in waves, and in order to reproduce certain bands of frequencies (high, middle, and low) in high fidelity a speaker needs different drivers to do so, each driver specializing in reproducing a certain band of frequency levels.  Hence, a subwoofer is responsible for reproducing very low frequencies, a woofer low frequencies, a mid-range speaker middle frequencies, a tweeter high frequencies, and a supertweeter for extremely high frequencies.  Subwoofers have the largest dimensions (specifically the biggest diameter), and a supertweeter would have the smallest dimensions.  When a cabinet contains two such drivers, it is referred to as a 2-way speaker system.

It is possible to buy a cabinet (structure housing one or several drivers) that houses many if not all of these drivers, or it is possible for each of them to be stand alone units.  Having these different drivers spaced correctly from each other, and creating a rich sound environment in a room is basically the most important aspect of properly setting up a speaker system.  To make sure that your speakers are being used in the most ideal fashion, you need to have a crossover system in place, which is a device that divides the audio input into different frequency bands (which, as we will see, can be exactly configured in certain crossover systems) and routes each of these bands to the driver that is most ideally suited to reproduce that range of frequencies.  Any speaker system using more than one driver has a crossover, though these are usually passive crossovers, which do not require an additional power source and are relatively built-in to the units.  More complicated systems use active crossovers, which do require an external power source and are a often a separate unit: these active crossovers can achieve higher amplitudes (which can break certain drivers of inadequate size or poor construction materials), can be more precisely configured, and separate the audio input into separate frequency bands before amplification, not after as passive crossovers do.  Having an active crossover will allow you to be able to fine tune your system a lot more than a system with a passive crossover, though of course not using an active crossover properly would be worse than simply listening through a passive one…so be careful of what you choose, and be honest with yourself about how much you really are able to do!

Now comes the important part—knowing where to position things.  It is incredible how much frequency interference there can be inside a room, and the best way to avoid this is by having each speaker (or rather, each driver) positioned properly.  First, a few definitions: in the room you will be setting the speakers system up in, the back wall will be the term used for the wall behind the speakers, and the side walls obviously the ones to the left and right of you as you sit there listening.  The optimal set up will inevitably require a significant amount (aka time) of tweaking with the arrangements, the spacing and all, but will be achieved if you are patient enough.  To begin to have an idea of the relation the speakers should have with you in the listening position, imagine yourself and the two spots where you will put your main cabinets (ideally containing a 3- or 4-way speaker system) as the three points of an equilateral triangle.  Make the distance of one side of that imaginary triangle equal roughly six to eight feet.  Now, make sure that the speaker cabinets are positioned at equal distances from their nearest side wall, which is to say that when you look forward at your speakers playing in your direction, the space to the right of the speaker on the right is the same length as the space to the left of the left speaker.  Try to vary the distance between each main speaker cabinet and the back wall, with one of them two feet from the back wall and the other three or four feet from the back wall.  Angle the speakers slightly inwards (i.e. facing slightly in towards each other, not away from each other), more or less pointing at the center point of the room (or wherever it is that your most common listening position will be, like a couch, for example).  Maintaining these general guidelines, fidget with the precise values, changing them a bit every few days and comparing the listening experience between the different orientations.

Generally, try to make sure that tweeters are positioned higher up on shelves or mounted to the wall, and keep subwoofers and woofers lower down to the ground.  Nonetheless, try to keep cabinets elevated to roughly the height you will be in when listening to your system, with tweeters (assuming they are independent units, which they may not be) slightly above the height of your head.  A great way to ensure optimal set up is to invest in some high quality speaker stands.