Damping factor or watts?

Shadorne is pretty much on the money, as are the other posts here. In audio its easy to make a small fortune- start out with a large one :)

In this case, buying by the specs (when it is your ears that ultimately matter), is going to flush a lot of money away. So be careful! If you would like some hints, the Magnaplaner people claim that the best they have heard their speakers is with tube amplifiers. They tell me that every time I see them.

Good Luck!

The idea of damping factor having an effect on the sound of a speaker is mostly myth. However, it is a bit tricky seperating myth from reality. Here's what is really going on:

Almost any amplifier driving a speaker will have an output impedance that is lower than the speaker, but the important thing to understand is that the speaker is reproducing signals from the amp. As the output impedance of the amplifier approaches the impedance of the speaker, the distortion of the amplifier rises. It is this increase in distortion that accounts for the muddy sound that results- the so-called 'loss of control'. IOW the amplifier does not 'loose control', it simply distorts more.

To really understand why this is so, you have to understand the fundamental operating principle of the speaker itself. When the amplifier puts power through the voice coil, the result is that the diaphragm is deflected. The deflection is related to the power that the amplifier is making at that instant. As the amplifier makes more and less power, both positive and negative, the speaker diaphragm follows the waveform of power presented to its voice coil.

IOW the diaphragm is powered **all the way** through the amplified waveform. There is no place at all where the amplifier 'lets go' of the speaker. In understanding of this fact is also the understanding of why 'damping factor' is one of the more misunderstood myths of audio.

Rodman99999, in the thread wherein I mentioned speaker cable length, I also mentioned 'characteristic impedance'.

As to your earlier question, the answer is 'yes'. I can point to a number of other examples wherein we find that a mythology has been created- where a mistake was made, something was considered negligible that later turned out not to be, or where something was said because a lot of money was involved.

Reread may statements about how the speaker works. Anytime a speaker is reproducing a signal, there is a cone position that corresponds to the amount of power in the voice coil. There are no musical signals that require full excursion and then have the amplifier 'let go' of the speaker. At any time when a speaker is making sound, the amplifier is **powering** the speaker to do that, whether it is full excursion or very nearly rest.

There is a story about the Emperor's new clothes. It is there to allow you to understand when something is being made up, and to see through it, even when the entirety of the culture is saying that the made up thing is real. Yet, the fact that an amplifier puts power through a speaker cannot be denied. So- you can go ahead believing the 'damping factor' story and that will not hurt you, but OTOH if you tend to look at these things closely, you will see after a while that that story can generate more questions than answers.

Rodman99999, on just about every speaker that I can think of, the suspension gets stretched as the speaker diaphragm moves away from the resting point. Furthermore, the speakers that have the most back EMF, i.e. the ones that are the most reactive, tend to be high efficiency designs, not low efficiency. In most high efficiency designs, the speaker is usually moving less, not more, due to the nature of the design.

The back EMF of such speakers is often the reason that amplifiers with large amounts of feedback (and often higher 'damping factors') usually sound more shrill on these speakers, as the back EMF becomes an unintended part of the feedback signal.

This is probably not what you would have initially thought. I know it was not for me! It turns out to get highly reactive speakers to calm down, you need an amp without feedback, i.e. low damping factor. In fact what you start to get about this is that the damping factor is for the most part irrelevant, whereas the amount of loop feedback is (the less the better).

So anyway, the issue of stopping the mass of the speaker is almost non-existant, unless you intend to amplify non-linear /non-musical signals. An example of that might be a linear motor in a disk drive. Damping in a situation like that would be quite important as the driving signal is not a function. But for audio, the amplifier is always sending the speaker a signal (power), and this power is always moving the cone incrementally in a new place.

To be otherwise suggests that the signal is not a function (which it has to be by definition). Like I mentioned before, the amp does not push the speaker to full excursion and then 'let go'. Since the signal is a function the cone is literally under power all the way back to zero and then beyond.

When I started this business I believed in damping and a lot of other things that I later found to be made up. I was fortunate though that I had enough exposure to the right classes in college and had read enough texts from the 'old days' that I was encouraged to look past the 'company line' to see what was really up. Turns out there have been two design paradigms in conflict in audio for a long time:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

And I definitely subscribe to one and not the other, just like everyone else in audio :)