Nonlinear Damping in Micro ‐Speakers

The mechanical and acoustical losses considered in the lumped parameter modeling of electro-dynamical transducers may become a dominant source of nonlinear distortion in micro-speakers, tweeters, headphones and some horn compression drivers where the total quality factor Qts is not dominated by the electrical damping realized by a high force factor Bl and a low voice resistance Re. This paper presents a nonlinear model describing the generation of the distortion and a new dynamic measurement technique for identifying the nonlinear resistance Rms(v) as a function of voice coil velocity v. The theory and the identification technique are verified by comparing distortion and other nonlinear symptoms measured on micro-speakers as used in cellular phones with the corresponding behavior predicted by the nonlinear model.