Sub output: Is it the woofer size or the rated RMS

Shadorne - I was thinking of three 10" woofers versus one 18" woofer (same area).

>It seems to me that a bigger, thicker, heavier cone would have reduced "compliance," if that is the right term, and therefore require a greater degree of damping than a smaller, lighter cone.

By the time you've built a speaker with a given pair of high-pass poles it doesn't matter whether the driver in question is a 26 gram 8" mid-bass, 166 gram 12" sub-woofer, something smaller, or something bigger.

Most of the damping is electrical. For instance, the Peerless 830452 bass drivers in my Orions have an electrical Q of .22, mechanical Qms of 3.90, and total Qts of .21 (those drop a bit in the H-frames due to the mass of the air).

When you make the motor stronger to maintain efficiency in spite of the heavy cone and stiff air spring, it's stronger when braking too.

>Putting it another way, couldn't the smaller, lighter, more compliant driver get away with a higher-Q enclosure, which would partially offset its limitations in low frequency extension and volume?

No. Qs higher than .707 produce a pass-band peak which is audible.

While a reasonable psycho-acoustic trick to give the impression of missing octaves for tiny speakers you don't want it in sub-woofers where tightly spaced equal loudness curves make a small peak especially noticeable. High-Q resonances are what give box store sub-woofers that anoying one-note boom-boom quality.

Isn't Q the dude from Star Trek w/ God-like powers?

I don't understand 1/2 of what you guys are saying. Alls I know is, for home theater I want 2 passive cabinents w/ 2 x 15" JBL woofers in each driven by 2 mono 1000w Boulder amps. For stereo music, I'll take a pair of 12" RELs.

Or, I'll take either of the subs (I think its the gigantic one that comes w/ extenal amp & XOver) from Wilson Audio. With Wilson, I wouldn't need more than one sub.

>Shadorne - I was thinking of three 10" woofers versus one 18" woofer (same area).

That's a bad comparison, because the bigger driver can have more excursion. The bigger surround can move farther, bigger basket accomodates a bigger spider which can move farther, etc.

You'd need 6 long-throw 10" drivers (DPL10 with 333 cm^2 Sd and 19mm xmax) to match one healthy 18" driver (Maelstrom 18 with 1182 cm^2 Sd and 33mm amax).

>You'd need 6 long-throw 10" drivers (DPL10 with 333 cm^2 Sd and 19mm xmax) to match one healthy 18" driver (Maelstrom 18 with 1182 cm^2 Sd and 33mm amax).

It's probably a bad specific example (the DPL is a high-Q driver appropriate for dipoles and infinite baffles) but there just aren't a lot of high-quality 10" drivers out there.