Virtual Acoustic Prototyping – Practical Applications for Loudspeaker Development

A. Salvatti
JBL Professional, Northridge, CA, USA
Published in 2010

The author presents an overview of methods to build virtual prototypes of both horns and loudspeaker drivers which allows a significant reduction in the number of physical prototypes, as well as reduced development time.
This paper will present some of the practical results from work the author has performed in the course of designing both transducers and horns using COMSOL Evolution of the technique and verification of the method with comparisons to actual measured data will be discussed.
Results from simple axisymmetric horns, progressing through the most general case of arbitrary shaped 3D horn contours are shown. The method outputs a full set of performance metrics including throat acoustical impedance, acoustical transfer function from throat to mouth, near-field and far-field frequency response at arbitrary off axis locations, and beamwidth. The method was successfully applied to a new family of recently developed horns used in a new line of commercial loudspeakers.