When it comes to typical rooms, often just a few changes can make all the difference. Soft furnishings (rugs, curtains, sofas, etc.) and items like bookshelves, decorations, and plants can absorb and diffuse (spread) sound, taming harsh reflections. Arranging speakers symmetrically in the room will bring out details and spatial resolution in recordings, while installing acoustic treatment will further temper the harshness that many rooms bring. Finally, using a measurement microphone and room equalisation will smooth out and refine the low frequencies.

Cardioid speakers use two or more woofers set apart from each other to create a directional dispersion pattern (radiation of sound into the three dimensions of space) that resembles a heart (“cardio-”) shape, focusing sound uniformly in the direction of the listening zone while minimising unwanted reflections elsewhere. This ensures better interaction between the speakers and the room’s acoustics, ensuring not only increased clarity and tonal accuracy but also more accurate and enveloping spatial reproduction.

The struggle to understand dialogue while streaming content on TV or personal devices is a problem familiar to most, originating from issues like the down-mixing of theatre-calibrated audio for small device speakers, unregulated volume levels across streaming platforms, and the sleek, speaker-concealing design of modern TVs. Subtitles are a makeshift solution, but not without compromising visual engagement. As the industry continues to clumsily navigate these issues, solutions such as integrating external speakers, experimenting with built-in dialogue-boosting features on streaming services, and making simple changes to the listening environment can make all the difference.

A high-end speaker delivers a natural, undistorted reproduction of the recording through advanced engineering and premium materials and components, such as drivers, crossover networks, and enclosure. It delivers clear, accurate sound not only directly to the listener but also to the room beyond, ensuring that the quality of both the direct and the reflected sounds arriving at the listener’s ears are tonally balanced, free of distortion, and spatially accurate and enveloping.

Unlike conventional speakers, which may radiate sound to their sides and back in an uncontrolled way (for example, more narrowly at high frequencies and more broadly at low frequencies), a constant directivity speaker is designed to maintain a consistent sound dispersion pattern over a wide range of frequencies. This consistent distribution of sound through the room ensures that both direct and reflected sound have a natural tonal balance and realistic spatial qualities.

Unlike passive speakers, which use passive electrical components (inductors, capacitors, etc.) to separate the sound into frequency bands, active speakers use electronic (often digital) crossovers to fulfil this function, before amplification of the signal and transmission of it to the individual drivers (woofers, tweeters, etc.). This allows for more precise control over the signal, in turn paving the way for reduced distortion, greater design flexibility, and more precise control of the speaker’s dispersion pattern - all in ways that are not possible with passive designs.