I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.

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ssl-3 a day ago | parent | next [-]

A 4-inch cube doesn't leave much room for a passive speaker to be very good (depending on one's definition of "good").

We've got hard physical constraints with loudspeaker systems, and they show up as tradeoffs.

Very broadly speaking, in practical terms, this takes the form of a tradeoff betwixt enclosure volume, efficiency, and low-end frequency extension. It's impossible to improve all three of these at once. This was formalized with Thiele and Small's work ~60 years ago.

We get by with amazingly good small, self-amplified, active speakers these days because -- as a system -- they don't have the same constraints.

At their root, they're still just passive speakers... but whole of an active system comprises more than that. We can use EQ to improve low-end extension. We can use bigger amplifiers to make up for lack of efficiency.

We can use combinations of dynamic EQ and bigger amps to make small systems sound pretty darned good even at low volume and hold together nicely at higher volumes, thanks in part of some of the work of Fletcher and Munson nearly a century ago and also to modern measurement systems and the inexpensiveness of implementing functions (with DSP in 2026) that would have been unthinkably complex in the consumer analog space at any point on the timeline.

But while active speakers can be pretty neat, small passive speakers suck. They have always sucked in some way. They must always suck in some way compared to their larger peers, and a cube shape always makes some aspects of the suck even worse. Them's the breaks.

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Anyway, the market wants small, active speakers these days...so we get small, active speakers. Reviewers are people too, and they review what people want to buy.

If I may ask: What's driving your desire for a small speaker that is also passive?

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thomas536 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My intuition is that a small radio from the 80s is sufficient. Has relatively small size and passive speaker. Small passive speaker and small enclosure are cheap aka not 100+ USD. A tonie box sounds fine. Can I diy reproduce one similar at low cost (less than buying 50 USD)?

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MaxikCZ 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of words explaining how something is hard to do because physics but in my layman experience any speaker I heard that didnt cost $500+ sounded horrible regardless of size, while my M1 Macbook Air sounds better than all of those, while keeping tiny formfactor.

Clearly it can be done, its just noone seem to be investing in RnD enough.

	▲	ssl-3 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It can be done on a Macbook because a Macbook is not a passive speaker. A Macbook comprises an entire audio system, with amplification and DSP and everything else that a passive speaker -- by its very nature -- can never provide. I explained this once. If you read through it, and take the time to understand it, and then think that you can explain it with superior brevity, then by all means: Feel free. :) If you have questions, then: Please ask them. If you think you can also defy what are commonly accepted to be real physical constraints and produce a tiny passive practical speaker that sounds great, then: By all means, do that as well! The proceeds of this kind of success can make you very wealthy -- maybe not Mars-mission wealthy, but probably at least beach house, private flights, and built-to-spec Porsche 911 GT3-level wealthy. You'll then be able to take time to decide what your next venture is, or perhaps decide to just live with that level of lavishness doing whatever makes you happy until your days run out. People with fresh ears are born every day.

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gitowiec a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Second hand Jabra Speak 410. It's the best because dumb and USB. Dumb makes it silent (no voiceover messages like "volume up" or "connection closed")