Again, you fail at writing coherent, non-run-on sentences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
RexAeterna 
the way speakers were designed since the 60's were called woofers for low frequencies but only handled down to 50hz and reason behind the name ''sub'' woofer is for sub-bass frequencies. they don't have to be built in a separate enclourse at all. lot of floor speakers since the mid 70's had them. it was rare tho to see a tower with both a woofer and sub in same cabnient cause the speaker would be huge and very heavy cause of the wood and magnets used.
most subs,yes today are built in a seperate enclourse especially for home theater but avg good qaulity floor speakers or bookshelf monitors will have a subwoofer already built in the same box with the tweeter and midrange or tweeter horns and ribbons depending on the speaker your going for. it's the cross-over that controls each specific frequency to a specific driver. can range anywhere from 5.5'' up to 18''. also it depends on the acoustics of the box and damping as well cause it will need to control the move-ment of air pushed and pulled to ensure the voice coil is not affected in any way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BlackbeardBen
No. A subwoofer is a woofer in an independent, separate enclosure that plays the bass frequencies.
Woofers can play anything from 5 Hz to 2000 Hz or more, depending on the speaker configuration.
And it'd help people reading your post if you could avoid run-on sentences.
No, a low frequency (cone) driver in a speaker is still called a woofer - and never a subwoofer except by request of the marketing department (which may be the source of your confusion). In fact, the first "subwoofer" was called a "bass speaker" - that was the 18" servo-controlled separate bass speaker that went with the Infinity Servo-Statik 1, designed in 1966 and widely released in 1968 (it was also, by far, the most expensive speaker set ever made at the time). If you'll kindly note, Wikipedia has been updated to reflect this in the last few days - by a regular contributor as a result of my research. I realized that Infinity's Servo Statik predated the subwoofers Ken Kreisel created (I believe he was inspired by them, actually), so I brought this up in the discussions there.
A few later Infinities, including the IRS I/II/III/V, IRS Beta, and RS-1b, have separate servo controlled bass towers for each side, with four to six 8"-12" woofers in each. They're still called bass towers, not subwoofers - the term wasn't even invented until later (I'd guess it was the movie Earthquake that spawned the name), by marketing departments eager to give an enticing name to their new products.
Yes, many speakers before that couldn't go lower than 40 Hz or so - especially the big electrostatic speakers that were the only real high-end speakers available then. But when speakers had woofers that went lower than that - they were not called subwoofers.
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That's the 1976 Infinity Quantum Line Source speaker. It extends all the way down to 18 Hz at -3 dB, thanks to its dual voice coil Watkins woofer. That driver is not a subwoofer, despite extending below where most subwoofers give up the chase.
This is the 1987 Infinity IRS Gamma. The woofers extends down to an almost unheard-of 15 Hz at -3 dB, thanks to a servo feedback control - like the one that Arnie Nudell and Gary Christie designed in the Servo Statik 1. They are not subwoofers.
Now, imagine a speaker that has a normal woofer - extending down to, say your 50 Hz magic number (higher than that, it would be a mid-bass coupler, like both the QLS and IRS Gamma have), that would make the speaker sound whole - if bass light. If there were another driver below that, producing, say 15 Hz to 50 Hz, I suppose you could call that a "sub-woofer", because it plays lower than the proper woofer in the speaker. Not because it plays "sub-bass" frequencies. 50 Hz is not sub-bass. Below 20 Hz, yes - that's the nominal limit of human hearing of a sine wave as a coherent tone, although you certainly feel below that and some people hear lower as tones (I can hear tones down to about 16 Hz or so). But how many speakers do you know that extend below 20 Hz? I'll give you a hint - there's not many of them, and they're all very expensive.
If the "woofer" doesn't play down to normal bass levels - the 50 Hz magic number you gave, or perhaps above or below that a little - then it is a mid-bass coupler. It couples the midrange and the bass driver (the woofer) together. If the "subwoofer" is of the same size and perhaps the exact same design as the "woofer", then it is just the low-tuned woofer (or just plain "woofer") and the other is the "high-tuned" woofer, or perhaps a mid-bass coupler (or interchangeably, the "mid-bass" woofer).
Now, show me a home speaker that has a built-in "sub-woofer" in the same cabinet that has a high-pass crossover at or near 50 Hz. I bet you can't find more than one or two esoteric designs, if any at all.
