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Lecture

Electroacoustic Absorbers: Experimental Evaluation

In course

EE-548: Audio engineering

This lecture is oriented towards the study of audio engineering, room acoustics, sound propagation, and sound radiation from sources and acoustic antennas. The learning outcomes will be the techniques for microphones and loudspeaker design, as well as room ...

Description

This lecture discusses the use of electroacoustic absorbers as perfect anechoic terminations at low frequencies, presenting an experimental evaluation of a broadband perfect sound absorber. It covers the introduction of anechoic terminations, the limitations towards low frequencies due to absorber size, the electrodynamic loudspeaker model, a feedforward strategy, and the achievement of almost 100% sound absorption below 100 Hz. The lecture concludes with perspectives on achieving effective ideal anechoic terminations and future work towards implementing in an Insertion Loss facility down to 50 Hz.

Instructor

Hervé Lissek

Official source

Related concepts (15)

Tube sound

Tube sound (or valve sound) is the characteristic sound associated with a vacuum tube amplifier (valve amplifier in British English), a vacuum tube-based audio amplifier. At first, the concept of tube sound did not exist, because practically all electronic amplification of audio signals was done with vacuum tubes and other comparable methods were not known or used. After introduction of solid state amplifiers, tube sound appeared as the logical complement of transistor sound, which had some negative connotations due to crossover distortion in early transistor amplifiers.

Absorption (acoustics)

Acoustic absorption refers to the process by which a material, structure, or object takes in sound energy when sound waves are encountered, as opposed to reflecting the energy. Part of the absorbed energy is transformed into heat and part is transmitted through the absorbing body. The energy transformed into heat is said to have been 'lost'. When sound from a loudspeaker collides with the walls of a room part of the sound's energy is reflected, part is transmitted, and part is absorbed into the walls.

Loudspeaker

A loudspeaker (commonly referred to as a speaker or speaker driver) is an electroacoustic transducer that converts an electrical audio signal into a corresponding sound. A speaker system, also often simply referred to as a speaker or loudspeaker, comprises one or more such speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections possibly including a crossover network. The speaker driver can be viewed as a linear motor attached to a diaphragm which couples that motor's movement to motion of air, that is, sound.

Extremely low frequency

Extremely low frequency (ELF) is the ITU designation for electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) with frequencies from 3 to 30 Hz, and corresponding wavelengths of 100,000 to 10,000 kilometers, respectively. In atmospheric science, an alternative definition is usually given, from 3 Hz to 3 kHz. In the related magnetosphere science, the lower frequency electromagnetic oscillations (pulsations occurring below ~3 Hz) are considered to lie in the ULF range, which is thus also defined differently from the ITU radio bands.

Soundproofing

Soundproofing is any means of impeding sound propagation. There are several basic ways to reduce sound: increasing the distance between source and receiver, decoupling, using noise barriers to reflect or absorb the energy of the sound waves, using damping structures such as sound baffles for absorption, or using active antinoise sound generators. Acoustic quieting and noise control can be used to limit unwanted noise.

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