Get more bass!

We all want more bass from our portable speakers – that’s one of the reasons the SoundBuckets were invented. The SoundBucket has been carefully designed to ensure it has bass like no other speakers its size. With a large 4″ bass driver it has the equivalent of over eight of the typical 2″ drivers found in most other speakers, so you’ll always get amazing bass, mids and treble, without having to resort to tricks.

But if you’ve got a normal portable speaker, how do you improve it’s bass?

Tip:

Well, there’s a simple way to increase the amount of bass from a speaker in a room, it’s all to do with where you position it!  The nearer to a boundary (wall or floor) you put the speaker, the more bass you’ll get.  Now in a typical room, there are 3 boundaries – the floor, a rear wall and a side wall. Each time you put the speaker against a boundary, you get more bass. If you put it on the floor and against the wall, you’ll get more, and if you put it on the floor in a corner, you’ll get even more!

Because the walls are doing the work, there’s also no stress on the speaker, the walls are just acting like an acoustic amplifier.

What’s the catch?

Of course nothings for free. What happens as you start to reflect sound back off the walls, is that it starts to interact with the original sound.  As the frequency gets higher, it starts to hollow out the sound, so the bass may be loud, the top Ok, but the middle range, where all the voices etc are, sounds a bit like a telephone.  Ideally to make it work perfectly, the speaker would be built into the corner, but this is tricky to do. Cylindrical speakers like the SoundBuckets work best, small flat ones may be best laid on their backs.  Speakers with drivers on both sides, may need to be put in the corner at an angle – just try it and see what work best.

So it’s great for parties, where you need to get the volume up, but not for everyday.

Of course if you want a perfect solution for all situations, you could always get a SoundBucket!

How does this work?

Here’s the science bit:  All speakers radiate bass notes as a bubble, a sphere of bass if you like, with the speaker in the centre.  The whole energy of the bass note is stretched across the outside of the sphere.  If you put the speaker on a boundary however, you reflect half of the energy back towards you, and because the boundary is close and the bass notes are low frequency, you don’t get any weird reflection issues.  Every time you focus the bass notes by putting a boundary behind them you double the bass power coming towards you.  That’s the equivalent of doubling the amplifier size!  In a corner you get 2x2x2 doubling of power, or 8x.

You may have seen big studio speakers mounted in a wall. This soffit mounting is not decorative, but uses the wall to increase the power output, amongst other things.

SoundBuckets are available at great discounts on Kickstarter until 15th July.