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Speaker Design and Testing – books

I have been refurbishing a pair of Renkus Heinz TRC151/9 speakers for a local venue and during the process have realized that in order to understand, design and optimize a sound system (made up of individual speakers), one must understand how a speaker works, why it is designed the way it is and how to understand what goes wrong and how to resolve it. One could assume that for an installation involving new speakers, they would all be functional but this would be a dangerous assumption. Certainly if you’re dealing with a system that is older, there may have been many opportunities for something to be done wrong. For example, something as simple as replacing a blown driver may lead to the replacement driver being reinstalled out of polarity. “Isn’t red the positive wire?” Maybe. “Isn’t the red terminal on a driver positive?” Maybe. Obviously we can’t leave it to chance that a system is properly configured. We must verify each part if we are to know that we are making things better and not just spinning our wheels.

How does one learn about speakers, speaker design, speaker testing?

Some books I have come across that seem worth having in your library are as follows:

Loudspeaker Design Cookbook 7th Edition – Vance Dickason
Testing Loudspeakers – Joseph D’Appolito

As I have been trying to verify that the TRC151 pair that I have are back to factory spec, I have realized that some times the measurement results for even a single cabinet as simple as a two way passive design can be overwhelming. What do you do when the measurement is cut and dry?

Ask questions. I’ve written Eminence to verify terminal polarity on the HF driver. I’ve written Renkus Heinz engineers to verify expected results.

I’m about to email McCauley Sound who provided the 15″ woofer for the Renkus Heinz TRC151/9 enclosure.

More soon.