Loudspeaker

A loudspeaker, speaker, or speaker system is an electromechanical transducer which converts an electrical signal into sound. The term loudspeaker is currently used for both individual devices and for complete systems consisting of one or more drivers (as the individual transducers are often called) in an enclosure, often with a crossover circuit. Their cost may range from pennies in a cheap radio to high-fidelity speaker systems costing many thousands of dollars. Loudspeakers are the most variable elements in any audio system, regardless of cost, and are responsible for marked audible differences between otherwise identical sound systems. Loudspeakers commonly have distortion a hundred to a thousand times greater than that of preamps, amplifiers or wire.

Full-range speaker systems are typically multi-driver systems, particularly when high SPL output or high accuracy are required. "Multi driver" means a speaker system containing two or more drive units, possibly including subwoofers, woofers, midranges, tweeters, or supertweeters. In loudspeaker specifications, systems are often classified as "N-way speakers", where N indicates the number of separate frequency bands, usually separated by an electrical filter called a crossover. A 2-way system will have woofer and tweeter sections; a 3-way system a combination of woofer, tweeter, and mid-range speakers, and so on.