What Does a Driver Unit Mean?

What Does a Driver Unit Mean?

The element inside a headphone that converts an electrical signal into sound is known as a driver unit. You could picture it as a tiny loud speaker in your headphone.

A driver unit is made of a magnet, voice coils and a diaphragm. One would wonder how to measure a driver: by its radius, circumference or diameter? The diameter is the stated spec which is usually measured in millimeters. A driver unit's size is useful to gauge the capabilities of producing sound.
How Does it Impact the Sound?

It may seem that the bigger the driver unit is, the louder the sound it's capable of producing. That's not true though, because for every headphone design, be it micro sized earphones or huge headphones, while the size of the driver unit varies, the loudest volume at which you would hear them, stays the same.

Why is it that the volume of headphones is not infinitely louder than that of earphones? The answer is, headphones are at a further distance away from your ear drums compared to that of earphones which practically hug your ear drums.

What Makes a Driver Unit Good?

Bigger the driver unit, larger the speaker, and more powerful is the output. This doesn't necessarily mean better output. The quality of the driver unit is what makes a huge difference to the sound. The size of the driver unit for earphones falls in the range of 8mm to 15mm and 20mm to 50mm for headphones.

Earbud style earphones have bigger driver units as compared to canalphones  because of their ability to house bigger units. Same is the case with headphones, an over-ear headphone will have bigger drivers as compared to on-ears.

Thanks for reading...


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