Mutual Coupling Between Loudspeakers

Introduction: A complete system for reproduction of sound in the home consists of a chain whose first link is formed by a turntable pick-up and whose final link is made up of one or more loudspeakers. The loudspeaker is considered among the weaker links of this chain. In fact, the quality of sound from a reproducing system can be entirely dependent upon the performance of its loudspeaker system.

Only in the last few years have separate speakers been employed to reproduce a part of the frequency spectrum. In present day sound systems two or more identical speakers are often installed to improve the performance over a part of this spectrum. Since the speakers work into the same elastic medium, there will be coupling of the speakers through the medium. The literature is almost entirely void of information concerning this coupling effect. It is the purpose of this thesis to investigate the mutual coupling between identical loudspeakers and to determine whether or not this coupling can be neglected in the design of multi-unit speaker systems.