Frequently asked questions
Generally the frequency range specified indicated the limits of where the performance has started to diminish. Many dome tweeters that are specified to extend out to 20kHz are already up to 3dB down at that point. By engineering the tweeter to extend to over 25kHz, we make sure that it has not already rolled off by 20kHz.
The best choice of cone materials is governed by the intended application. Not all materials are ideal for all applications. The advantage of aluminum for the bass driver is its good balance between performance and cost. It is easily formed, consistent in production and has a good ratio of stiffness to weight. More exotic materials have very little further advantage in this size of bass driver. With the midrange driver, we generally find ourselves working with materials that are not rigid over their operating range. For example in the Debut speaker range, we use Aramid fiber. This gives us the capability of carefully controlling the cone flexing to get the best performance. This difficulty in design is somewhat ameliorated by having a three way speaker, and also now allows us to change to an approach that eliminates flexing within the operating range. Aluminum, as optimized in the Uni-Fi midrange, has its first flexure mode at a high 8kHz which results in excellent performance.
The principal advantage is that the drivers are operating over a narrower frequency range. As a result they can be better optimized for their intended purpose. In particular, the bass/midrange driver is no longer required to reproduce both bass ad mid frequencies simultaneously. This reduces the total amount of power going into each driver, reduces distortion and produces a clearer midrange and more dynamic bass performance.
The purpose of the spikes are to increase the cabinet stability to prevent them being knocked over, particularly when they are used on carpeted floors. In the case of wood floors or floors that may be easily damaged by the spikes, we recommend that you place something under the tip of the spikes to prevent damage.
You may well get away without using a subwoofer at all, even with our bookshelf speakers. All our speakers are designed to have an extended bass response, giving up some efficiency in order to achieve this. If your listening habits are predominantly with music that doesn’t have super low bass recorded, or not at high levels, then you can enjoy the simplicity of just the main pair of speakers. However, if you have a large listening space, like to listen to music very loud or to music that contains lots of low bass or want to use the speakers as part of a home theater setup then a subwoofer would be advantageous.
All speakers are governed by the laws of physics. There are in particular three parameters that are inter-linked : Box size, low frequency response and efficiency. This limits your choices. You cannot have both a small box and a high efficiency and an extended bass response. If you want low bass and a small box you cannot have high efficiency.If high efficiency is a goal, then the speaker can play loud with only a modest power amplifier, but will not have good bass response. However, the number of opportunities for playing loud music at home tend to be limited. Most of the time we listen at only modest sound levels. As such, we sacrifice bass response for all our music, for the trade-off that occasionally we can play loud.The Debut series priority was to be able to have extended bass and so we gave up somewhat on efficiency, recognizing also that higher power amplifiers are lower cost than ever, if one needs the ability to play loud!
With wall mounting, rear vents may end up being in very close proximity to the wall. You are not likely to choke of the bass coming out of the vent, but you will strongly modify the sound of the bass, and it may be overwhelming. Two solutions can be used:
1. If using a subwoofer in a home theater setup, set the xover point to no lower than 80Hz. This will then eliminate frequencies that would normally come from the vent and reduce the problem.
2. If all else fails, sometimes stuffing the rear vent of the speaker will help reduce the amount of bass. An old sock or foam ball can work quite well!
3. Take a look at one of our on-wall speaker solutions
We do not recommend any Atmos enabled speaker as a general surround speaker. The Atmos requirements are quite specific in terms of restricted directivity and bass response. As a result the Atmos speakers are designed to be used no lower than 180Hz and therefore require the receiver to limit the low frequencies going to the Atmos speakers to 180Hz. Feeding low bass to the speaker could result in damage.
Putting the speakers closer to walls and corners will give you more bass, and quite possibly too much bass. In such situations, you could try changing your listening location to one that minimizes the effect of this boost. Alternatively, a simple tone control might help alleviate the problem. Alternatively, if you are using a subwoofer, the setting a high-pass filter to the main speaker at around 80Hz will eradicate the problem. If all else fails, sometimes stuffing the rear vent of the speaker will help reduce the amount of bass. An old sock or foam ball can work quite well!
The $64,000 question! This is so difficult to answer with any certainty. It is so dependent upon the particular circumstances of your listening room. There have been some attempts to give rules of placement, such as the rule of thirds. This however in practice is just so limiting. Very few rooms are of a regular shape, and added to that are the different acoustic properties of the walls, the floor, the windows and of openings into other rooms, that blanket rules are largely wishful thinking.
Some clear pointers are that:
1. Putting the speakers closer to walls and corners will give you more bass, and quite possibly too much bass
2. Location the listening seat will give you more bass, and maybe too much
3. Listening dead center in the room will likely give you a big null in the bass at some frequencies and result in uneven reproduction of bass notes.
The simple answer is that there is no simple solution. Start by placing the speakers about 10’ apart, listen around 12’ away, keep the speakers around 3’ from rear and side walls, listen around 2/3rds of the way down the room, then just keep experimenting. Listening to some music with good, consistent bass that explores the full range of the bass frequencies, and then keep moving the speakers inch by inch and listening for the most even reproduction of each bass note. It can be a long involved process, but is worth it in the long term.
Speaker impedance is an indication of how much power will be drawn from the amplifier. For a given voltage from the amplifier, a lower impedance will result in a higher current draw and more power being delivered form the amplifier to the speaker. All other things being equal, higher impedance is a good thing. Of course, all things are not equal!
The speaker with the lower impedance will always sound louder when directly compared to one with higher impedance, so this is often a way that manufacturers can gain some advantage in such comparisons. However, as stated earlier, there is no free lunch. It’s louder because it is taking more power from the amplifier.
Unfortunately, there is not a good, easy way to characterize the speakers’ impedance or its demands placed upon the amplifier with music signals.
The most universally accepted definition simply states that the minimum impedance should be no lower than 80% of the rated impedance, For an 8 ohm speaker, this means 6.4 ohms minimum and for a 4 ohm speaker 3.2 ohms minimum. However, not only do many manufacturers ignore this basic specification, it doesn’t state over how much of the frequency range the impedance stays close to the minimum. One that only occasionally dips low will place very different demands upon the amplifier than one that is always close to the minimum.
Therefore it is not easy to state unequivocally whether a particular speaker will work on a particular amplifier. However, we do stay within the accepted limits: the minimum impedance does not drop below 80% of the rated impedance, and we try and minimize how much of the frequency range that it is at that minimum value.
Stereo imaging is the illusion created of a spread of sound between the two speakers that mimics the sound heard at the original performance, or that is created in the studio. It typically has parameters that include perceived width, height, depth, specificity and instrumental separation. Some systems and technologies can give a better image than others (our concentric drivers for instance), and some listeners judge this parameter less important than the musical performance itself, such as perceived rhythm and timing, musical communication etc.
You may well get away without using a subwoofer at all, even with our bookshelf speakers. If your listening habits are predominantly with music that doesn’t have super low bass recorded, or not at high levels, then you can enjoy the simplicity of just the main pair of speakers. However, if you have a large listening space, like to listen to music very loud or to music that contains lots of low bass or want to use the speakers as part of a home theater setup then a subwoofer would be advantageous.
There is no simple answer because it depends on your associated equipment and the listening environment. First let me say that the answer is applicable to both movies and home theater. Typically, bookshelf speakers have limited bass output, both in terms of frequency extension and bass dynamic capability.
Clearly, the small size of a bookshelf limits the size of bass driver that can be accommodated and so limits how much air the driver can move. To reproduce low frequencies, we need to move a lot of air.
Secondly there is a relationship between the cabinet size, the low frequency extension and the efficiency that is attainable, governed by the pesky laws of physics. One cannot have bass extension, high efficiency and a small box. If we therefore limit the size of box, as in a bookshelf speaker, we must give up efficiency or bass response. Obviously for a floor stander we have greater cabinet volume along with the capability of accommodating either larger drivers or multiple smaller drivers, so the limitations of the bookshelf are largely overcome. We can have somewhat higher efficiency, or better bass response and more bass output.
So, do we need all of the gains that the floorstander can give us? This will depend upon musical tastes, how loud you like to listen, how big is your listening space, how far away from the speaker you listen, and how powerful your amplifier is. What we do attempt in our designs is to give the bookshelf speakers almost the same bass extension as the floorstanders, so that you are still able to hear most of your music, just at a lower maximum volume level.
Let’s consider the perfect speaker. It would contain just one full range driver. This driver would work down to the lowest frequency (20Hz) at full output level, and respond up to the highest frequencies (20kHz or beyond). It would have a constant directivity pattern and high efficiency to minimize amplifier requirements.
Not only does this driver not exist, it is not even possible given the laws of physics! To reproduce low frequencies we must move a large volume of air, albeit relatively slowly. This demands a large diameter driver which by necessity is quite heavy.
For high frequencies we only need to move a small volume of air, but we must do so very quickly.
These two requirements are mutually opposed. In addition we are not going to e=achieve a constant directivity response.
For these reasons we are forced to consider a two way system. One driver dedicated to high frequencies and one to low, with a xover network to direct the appropriate frequencies to the appropriate driver. This works well enough fora lot of applications, and is certainly a cost effective solution for the most part. However, it does have it’s limitations.
Firstly, the woofer must ideally have a good clean response up to a couple of octaves above the xover frequency. Likewise the tweeter must have clean response to a couple of octaves below the xover frequency. These requirements are not easy to achieve.
If we now consider a three way system, we have increased complexity, but with attendant benefits. Each drive, (bass, midrange, tweeter) now is only required to operate of a narrow frequency range. Their design can be better optimized for his range. The overall directivity response can be better engineered.
The cost in this approach is the need for a complex three way xover network. Often these are poorly designed, leading to less than perfect blending together of the drivers, and an audible discontinuity in the response. ELAC engineers however have decades of experience in computer aided xover network design, and contributed to some of the earliest research in this field. As a result we are able to engineer three way system with extraordinary driver integration.
Loudspeaker drivers come in many sizes, varieties, intended applications, cost, and performance requirements. There is no such thing as one size fits all. As a result, the best cone material is not necessarily the newest flavor of the month. The best cone material is the one that best fits the purpose for which the driver is intended to be used. Take a subwoofer driver for instance. It is generally large in order to move enough air, but the cone can be heavy. In addition, it needs to work down to low frequencies but not up to high ones. In fact, the range is so restricted that often the cone resonances are way above the required operating range for even traditional cones materials such as paper. In his instance, the cone is required to resist the high back pressure exerted on it from the cabinet so must be stiff when acted on by that pressure.
Another example would be a driver intended for very high efficiency. In this case the cone must be very light. If we also need it to act as a midrange, it must have an extended high end response. So the cone resonances must be correspondingly high. The factor that sets this parameter is the stiffness to weight ratio. Normally, we only care about getting the ratio as high as possible. This can be achieved by high mass and very high stiffness, or low mass and not so high stiffness. Clearly the optimum, in this example, would be the low mass version.
At ELAC we are very careful to design our drivers specifically for the system in which it will be used, rather than develop a generic driver that is sold for use in as many systems as possible. In his way the driver is optimized to meet the many variables that exist and must be optimized in any particular system design.
Perceived ‘bigness’ comes from how evenly sound covers a room—called directivity—not just how many channels are playing. A well‑engineered loudspeaker controls dispersion so more seats hear a consistent tonal balance and stereo image. Many soundbars spread energy poorly, creating a wide but thin field that collapses off‑axis. Controlled directivity delivers a deeper, wider soundstage with fewer speakers when placement and room interaction are right
No. Loudness depends on speaker sensitivity plus power. A high‑sensitivity speaker can play louder with less power than a low‑sensitivity design. Two systems with different sensitivities fed the same watts will produce different SPL. Choose speakers and power as a system, not power in isolation.
Disposable bars often get replaced every 12–24 months due to dated features or failures. A serviceable hi‑fi uses modular parts with long support, so owners upgrade or repair instead of replacing the whole system. Over 10 years, maintenance plus occasional component upgrades typically cost less than repeated full replacements—while performance improves, not degrades.