Bigger is Better... No Littler is Better... No Bigger... No Littler... Oh Whatever

Anybody who loves listening to music, and who doesn’t, appreciates the importance of the equipment used to play it. Every single component chosen for a system can make a difference in the way that the music sounds.

No matter how complex or how simple the audio device or system is, every system needs speakers, or headphones, or ear buds to get the sound from the device producing or playing the sound to the audience.

When I first started to really enjoy listening to music, transistor radios came out. These amazing devices, no bigger than a deck of playing cards, were the rage. Imagine being able to have something so small that could play music through a tiny speaker, or even better, through earphones which put the music right into your head.

I remember my dad getting me a such transistor radio when I was about ten years old. I thought that I was beyond cool to have such a neat gadget. In retrospect, the sound from the teeny speaker was OK, but when I put in my earphones, the sound was even better.

However, if you really wanted to be serious about listening to your music, you needed separate free-standing speakers, the bigger the better. And of course, the bigger the speaker, the more expensive it was. In order to get truly room-shaking sound, you had to have at least two mammoth wooden columns containing the speakers, each pair costing several thousand bucks.

Now, we lived in an apartment, so space and budget dictated that I was going to have to get something a lot smaller than these behemoths. So, I bought a pair of wooden bookshelf speakers, each about 16 inches high, 10 inches deep, and perhaps 12 inches wide. The sound was so much better than my transistor radio’s teeny speaker, but it still didn’t sound like a concert hall.

So, I then got a pair of really good headphones, the kind that enclosed each ear in a pressure-tight cushioned pad. The sound from these Koss Pro 4AA was great, but the cushions were covered in vinyl, and after a while of listening, your entire ear was drenched in sweat. But hey, what’s a little sweat when the music sounds so good? I neglect to mention that these professional quality headphones cost a few hundred dollars a pair.

After about 10 or 15 years, I noticed that newer high-quality speakers were getting smaller, but they still cost a couple of thousand bucks a pair. Electronics being electronics, however, the prices started to come down a bit, so that even a young guy with a modest income could perhaps afford a pair of good speakers. Now these new purchases were certainly a lot better quality than my original bookshelf speakers, but they still didn’t come close to the sound of live music in a concert hall.

This, of course, lead many of us back to the idea of getting a pair of larger speakers, the kind that you could use as an end table, placed on either side of your sofa. These things, enclosed in beautiful wood so that they blended with the room’s décor, certainly produced a better sound, and they didn’t cost quite as much.

But, when you couldn’t afford both good speakers and real end tables, you needed to use the speakers for purposes other than listening to music. Your guests needed to rest their drinks on top of the speakers. The only problem with this use of the speakers was that the vibrations produced by the music had the potential of causing the glass of beer, wine, or whatever, to tip over and spill their?contents all over the front of the speaker, causing a mess and perhaps ruining the speaker.

Back to the drawing board!

After a while music-lovers, and sound engineers, realized that you could get the great sound of giant speakers without needing to devote so much interior real estate to their placement in the room. All that you had to do was cut a couple of holes in your ceiling or your walls and install small speakers in those openings. The smaller speaker got a better sound because it used the air space contained in the ceiling or wall to act like an echo chamber.

Now, of course, our ceilings and walls started to have a little bit of a swiss-cheese look to them. Still, for the audiophile it was all worth it.

It wasn’t long after all of these speakers were installed in the walls and ceilings that newer speakers, containing many small speakers in a small enclosure, came on the market. The acoustic geniuses figured out that you could have 5 or 6 or even 12 small speakers built into a small cabinet, each speaker pointing in a slightly different direction, which would yield a really full sound.

So now, I have ceiling speakers in 3 rooms which are used only rarely, because I have two smart speakers, one a sound bar attached to a TV, and one about 5 inches high resting on a console in my den, which are capable of producing the most incredible sound imaginable, for a fraction of the cost of the walnut behemoth end table speakers.

I think that I’ve achieved acoustic perfection! At least, that is, until the next new generation of even tinier speakers comes out. Perhaps I should look into implantable nano-speakers?

Mike [email protected]