While much attention is paid to the construction and design of loudspeakers used in sound systems, speakers are complex systems, with their performance defined by the interaction of the speaker, speaker enclosure, as well as location and positioning in the room.

The goal of a speaker is to create sound waves, which are vibrations in the air produced by the forward and backward movement of the speaker cone. However, a speaker, by itself outside of any enclosure, will produce relatively little sound, because movement of the cone will push air from one side, but pull air from the other. This will cause a circular current of air, as the pressure from one side of the cone flows into the suction on the other, cancelling out some frequencies almost entirely, and diminishing the volume and sound of the speaker. Therefore, some sort of enclosure is required, in order to prevent the waves from the back of the speaker from interfering with the waves produced by the front. The purpose of this project is to provide a basic introduction to how and why speaker enclosures are engineered, and the purpose of their various features.

Eli is a Mathematics major, musician, and sound engineer.