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What is a full-range driver In usage, Harry F. Olson, helped define the term full-range driver as any loudspeaker drive unit capable of quality reproduction of bass through treble (musically defined) with usable dynamic range. “All our words from loose-using have lost their edge.” —Ernest Hemingway
Web based communication, particularly the forum, has descended into a political art-form, one without regard for lexicon exactitude or morality. We are vulgar with our misuse of even common language to say nothing of the technical.
Woolly: lacking in definiteness or incisiveness; ‘muzzy’; (of the mind [style], etc.) confused and hazy. (O.E.D.)
Woolly: (of a sound) indistinct and distorted. Oxford American Dictionaries
“Woolliness is that fault of style which consists in writing around a subject instead of on it; of making approximations serve as exactitude; of resting content with intention as opposed to performance; of forgetting that whereas a haziness may mean something to the perpetrator, it usually means nothing (or an ambiguity) to the reader or the listener. The ideal at which a writer should aim—admittedly it is impossible or attainment—is that he write so clearly and precisely that his words can bear only one meaning to all averagely intelligent readers that possess an average knowledge of that language used.” —The Concise Usage and Abusage, 1954. Eric Partridge
The majority of audio insiders today would do well to read more and posture less, most only have a vague understanding of the term full-range driver which to us reflects a general lack of understanding and appreciation for audio and its history. Here’s an example:
06-07-06: Onhwy61 “Why is the Zu driver referred to as a full range driver (FRD)? While it's an impressive piece of engineering, it doesn't cover what is traditionally considered the full audio range, namely 20-20k Hz.”
(http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?cspkr&1149660231&openflup&10&4#10) Intended or not, this is misleading to the non-technical reader in two ways. First, “full-range” as used by Zu is a product category and the Zu driver clearly falls within this category. A term fully understood and defined, with deep history. If unaware of this history, it might be interpreted or spun as hype. Secondly, the quoted audio bandwidth is the modern ASA / ANSI definition, not traditional standard.
Traditionally, single drive units capable of covering the bandwidth of roughly 60 Hz to 8 kHz have for over six decades been marketed as full-range—a category all having particular shared characteristics. Zu specifically defines its use of the term full-range in its marketing efforts, stating that our 10.3” full range driver has an in-room bandwidth capacity of 35 Hz to 12 kHz, roughly eight and a half octaves. Super-tweeter covers the top octave, harmonics on muted trumpet, pan flute, a bit of shimmer on cymbals.... Zu is accurate in our use of the term to describe our 10” driver.
The second problem is linked to the first, inferring that anything short of being able to reproduce the nearly ten octave audio bandwidth can never be regarded as full-range. There seems to be an undertone in the public forms, Zu antagonists, maybe that’s a bit heavy, lets go with challengers, advancing the idea that Zu is less than technical and mainly marketing driven. This is false; the proofs are in the product. What about writings? They’ll come as time permits. Anyway, challengers infer Zu is misleading the audio community by calling our transducer a full-range driver. Okay, maybe we get going on our communications so we don’t have to deal with this kind of stuff, Audiogoners like Cobra213 have been telling us this for years now. It’s the loose-use of terms however that seems to aid the antagonistic crowd. In our opinion much of the odd posturing and self worth tied to audio disposition keyboard punching is leading many who visit such sights away from the audio hobby.
The ANSI hearing standard is not the “traditional... full audio range”—consider the traditional musical scales, dating back millennia; they average a 32 Hz to 8 kHz bandwidth. And, in the grandest sense, the full-range of the audio spectrum is 1 Hz to 1 MHz—air’s capacity to support sound. The full audio band as defined by radio guys is 10 Hz to 300 kHz. Yes, Onhwy61’s intended idea was the Zu full-range driver does not cover the full spectrum of sound humans are capable of hearing, and true, Zu’s 10.3” full range driver cannot cover even the full musical spectrum. Note, musical scales were developed regionally, all appear octave based, some descending down below 14 Hz. If interested, some great reading can be found about musical scales and the advent of modern acoustics in Science & Music by Sir James Jeans, 1937.
To understand the modern definition of human hearing let me quote the following undisputed reference: “The most familiar acoustic phenomenon is that associated with sensation of sound. For the average young person, a vibration disturbance is interpreted as sound if its frequency lies in the range of about 20 to 20,000 Hz (1 Hz = 1 hertz = 1 cycle/second). However, in a broader sense acoustics also includes the ultrasonic frequencies above 20,000 Hz and the infrasonic frequencies below 20 Hz. The nature of the vibrations associated with acoustics are many, including the simple sinusoidal vibrations produced by a tuning fork, the complex vibrations generated by a bowed violin string, and the nonperiodic motions associated with an explosion, to mention but a few.” —Fundamentals of Acoustics, 3rd edition C. 1982 by Kinsler, Frey, Coppens, Sanders.
Of interest to some; Zu’s in-house defined wide-band audible scale is 14 Hz to 18 kHz, with a music-centric weighting the Zu in-house bandwidth is regarded as 32 Hz to 16 kHz, not a bell curve with center focus but a asymmetric curve with a focus skewed to the lower octaves.
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