Driver types

Why it matters

You don’t pick a “speaker” — you pick drivers for the jobs your design needs covered. Knowing the types tells you how many you need, where they hand off, and what the crossover has to do.

How it works

A driver works best over a limited band. Big cones move enough air for bass but can’t move fast enough for clean treble; small domes do treble but can’t displace enough air for bass. So most systems split the work:

• Subwoofer — deep bass, roughly below 80–100 Hz. Large excursion, heavy cone.
• Woofer / midbass — bass and lower mids, often 40 Hz to a few hundred Hz.
• Midrange — the critical voice band, roughly 300 Hz to 4 kHz.
• Tweeter — treble above a few kHz, usually a small dome or compression driver.
• Full-range — one driver covering most of the band. Simple, no crossover, but it trades deep bass and top-end extension for that simplicity.

The number of bands names the design: a two-way is woofer plus tweeter, a three-way adds a dedicated midrange. More ways means more drivers and a more complex crossover, but each driver stays in its comfort zone.

Common mistakes

Simple example

Related concepts

• Speaker driver
• Speaker parameters
• Crossover