Determining Manufacture Variation in Loudspeakers Through Measurement of Thiele/Small Parameters
Scott Laurin and Karl Reichard (Penn State University), AES Convention 125, 6 October 2008. The spoke’s first peer-reviewed conference paper, and the first source here that measures a claim the corpus already held on encyclopedic authority.
Read from the AES e-library listing only — title, authors, venue and the summary paragraph. The paper itself is behind the e-library and this page claims nothing from inside it. What it establishes is that the measurement was done and what it was for, not what the numbers were.
The claim it tests
ts-parameters-wikipedia told this wiki that T/S parameters are small-signal snapshots that drift with level, temperature and age and vary unit to unit, which is the basis of the standing advice that a careful builder measures their own driver rather than trusting a datasheet (thiele-small-parameters).
Laurin and Reichard take twenty nominally identical loudspeakers and measure the T/S parameters of each, on the stated premise that “manufacturing tolerances can have a large impact on the variability and quality of loudspeakers produced.” The listing also says the follow-on work aimed to correlate parameter spread with differences in failure mode and operating lifetime.
Why it matters to this spoke
Three things, in order of usefulness:
- Unit-to-unit variation stops being folklore. The advice to measure your own driver has been carried here from a Wikipedia article and from builder practice. This is an AES paper whose entire subject is that spread, measured across a sample.
- It points at consequence, not just tolerance. The interesting move is the second phase — treating the parameter spread as a predictor of failure and lifetime rather than as a quality-control nuisance. Nothing else in this corpus connects the design parameters to how long a driver survives.
- It dates the practice. 2008, under the IEC 60268-5 regime that has since been withdrawn — so a modern replication would be measuring under different standards, which is itself the kind of comparison the spoke now knows to ask for.
What it cannot establish here
No numbers. The spread’s magnitude, which parameters vary most, and whether the failure-mode correlation held are all inside a paper this wiki has not read. Treat this page as evidence that the measurement exists, not as its result. Closing that properly needs the full text or a later paper citing its figures.
Related
thiele-small-parameters · ts-parameters-wikipedia · loudspeaker-driver · iec-60268-5-replacement · audio-engineering-society · synthesis