A First Time Buyer's Guide To PA Speakers

Loudspeakers are one of the most underrated part of PA systems. There are different types of PA speakers available in the market. You have to choose the best PA speakers based upon the budget that you have, the area you want to cover and the number of speakers you have the infrastructure to deploy.

How do PA speakers work:

 

The PA speakers take the electronic signal from a PA mixer or directly from the PA amplifier and convert the signals back into sound waves. The process by which the speaker functions is exact opposite to the procedure used by a microphone.

The PA speaker consists of a thin diaphragm. This diaphragm is mounted on a bowl like frame and it is connected by two wires which are wrapped around a small cylinder. The coil formed by wrapping the wire around the cylindrical object is called the voice coil.

When current is run through the voice coil, the cylinder around which it is wrapped becomes an electromagnet and it makes the voice coil vibrate. When the voice coil moves, the diaphragm which is attached to it moves as well. The movement of diaphragm causes generation of sound waves which travel to our ears.

Different types of PA speakers :

There are two major types of PA speakers. Powered PA speakers and passive PA speakers. The powered PA speakers are a new breed of PA speakers. The main advantage of these PA speakers is that they eliminate the need of an in line amplifier to be deployed in PA system.

Rather these powered PA speakers have their own amplifiers built within the speaker enclosure. They are called powered PA speakers because they need power to operate the on board amplifier. Apart from this a number of other features are built into powered PA speakers. The main focus of these features is to reduce the noise and signal distortion. A number of these subsystems also need power to operate.

The main advantage with powered PA speakers is that when these speakers are used in a PA system, there is no need to spend a lot of money on the amplifiers. These speakers can accept input right from the microphone as well as audio mixer console. On the flip side, the fact the these PA speakers need electricity to operate means that there must be a wall outlet somewhere near the speaker to make it function.

The other variety of PA speakers are the plain passive speakers which convert the electronic signal into sound waves. They do not require any additional power nor do they come with any fancy gadgetry. These PA speakers are much cheaper as compared to powered speakers but you have to buy the amplifier which more or less levels the price.

You should do proper market research before you buy any PA speakers for your PA system. Its recommended to buy good quality PA speakers for longer life of PA system.