Basic question about loudspeakers

[Edwin]

Can somebody point me towards a not-too-technical article that deals with the following.

The cone of a LS is moved to and fro by a magnet and coil so that it oscillates in accordance with the signal fed into it. Yet that same to and fro movement can reproduce simultaneously a whole range of clearly distinguishable instruments at different volumes and timbres, and human voices that are so true as to be clearly recognisable. I've never understood how the one physical "fore and aft" movement can incorporate all these different features at the same time.

I suppose that a similar process is going on at every stage from the recording to the LS (and in the human ear).

[pre65]

Google is your friend on this one.

Here's one to get you started.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker

[Mike G]

If thats a basic question, i hope you don't have any tricky ones you need an answer too!!

[A Stuart]

Originally Posted by Edwin

how the one physical "fore and aft" movement can incorporate all these different features at the same time.

As you touched upon, the complicated bit is the perception from the single pressure pattern hitting the ear, regardless of source (original or loudspeaker), of all these features by the ear/brain.
(Barring stereo information deducible from differences between the two ears and visual clues eg seeing somone's lips or expression, feeling through your feet/hands/chest and probably other things I can't think of ), all one's brain receives at any one instant is the neural representation of the frequencies present in the one pressure pattern.
The speaker "simply" maps into air pressure the electrical signal it is fed, within the abilities of design and materials necessary to build a real-life loudspeaker.

The recording engineer in turn tried to capture the original pressure pattern so that it will record and play back producing a pressure pattern suitably near the the real thing.

The books I have in front of me, Capel,V. "An Introduction to Loudspeaker Design" Bernard Babani (1988), and Vander Sherman & Luciano "Human Physiology" 2e, Univ of Michigan (1975) are probably long out of print, but I am sure Abingdon library has books concerning either aspect in different depths.
I believe one of the forum members has declared himself as an ear person, so I will not tread too far in that direction.

Don't forget, a single waveform can contain much more than a single frequency sinewave at any given instant, as depicted by this sample attached.
The single waveform, top, is mapped below in its frequency content.

(I am quite new to using Audacity, and will have to think about the meaning of the odd distribution on the frequency plot. I may have done some heavy-handed digital filtering on the file. )

[Edwin]

When I put the question, I had a vague idea that all the different components of the sound were coming together as separate strands and that the technology from microphone to amplifier to LS had to somehow deal with all of them - hence I used the word "simultaneous", which I now think was wrong. As I understand from your replies, the signal at any given small fraction of a second is a sort of composite of all the signals (that is different from any of them individually) and that's what the LS diaphragm is reproducing. If that's so, it's still mind-boggling that the LS can adapt so quickly and accurately to a stream of information that's changing thousands of times a second and apparently disentangle it all. I'm realising that the ear is part of the same sequence of operations, reproducing the complex vibrations from the LS, and that it is the brain that does the disentangling.

Thanks for letting some light into a dim corner.

[Grog]

the really amazing part is when you calculate the acceleration of a tweeter dome for instance!
also the force involved in a woofer, this can easily be in the order of 150 newtons+ or ~15kg,