Perplexed on how single driver speakers can cover such a large Hz range


I googled till I was blue in the face. I've always wondered how in the world the cone of a single driver speaker, with no crossovers, at any given ten thousands of a second, be vibrating a hefy 60Hz and also a sizzling 10 kHz. To me it's like quantum mechanics. I don't understand. I just have to accept.

marshinski15

Then you have transmission line cabinets with single drivers that can go low. Sibelius is one such speaker. But yeah, it isn't for playing crazy loud. All speaker designs are compromises.  I can't remember but Zu or Tekton have a two-driver speaker where the crossover is a very high 12KHz to the tweeter. So the woofer/mid is really doing about 95% of the work and most people on the high side of 60 probably can't even hear the tweeter much anyway. 

An interesting oldie from the 70s was the Rectilinear X(ten) 3 way but the mid range ran from 200 Hz to 8 kHz with a 2 " cone tweeter above that and a 10" woofer in a closed box below so an almost full range speaker. And interestingly the crossover was a series one not a conventional parallel design.

But I agree with lots of us that full range has too many compromises in cut off lows and highs and inability to play loud. But I do love the top to bottom integration. You sense there is no crossover.

Just a closing thought. Perhaps the best full range speakers are a few one way planars and electrostatics. The most wonderful being perhaps the Quad 63 which even could image. 

The old constraints described above for crossoverless single-driver speakers have  been nearly, if not totally, eliminated:

https://www.cubeaudio.eu/reviews

+1 about electrostatics. But even though my Sound Labs get down to 30Hz, they can’t play those lower frequencies at a decent volume, so I added a subwoofer. 
 

To OPs question, think of the surface of a pond that can have different sized waves crossing at the same time from different directions. Your speaker cone is like the pond, vibrating lower frequency waves and high frequency waves all at the same time. The speaker can do that. That’s what music is. As others have pointed out, the quality/accuracy of the sound reproduced by a single cone driver is debatable. 

Speakers don't exactly create different frequencies and then put them together. The single signal is a complex combination created by a signal composed of all the frequencies a microphone picks up. The signal is a complex of hills and valleys one after the other all combined into one ever changing signal.