Are 8″ Speakers Too Big?

In a word, no. In two words, not necessarily.

If your workstation is too small to fit 8″ speakers, then obviously the speakers are too big for you. But broadly speaking, the size of speaker you can use depends on where you sit in relation to the speakers and, more importantly, the design of the speakers.

Conventional wisdom says that the distance between your speakers is how far from them you should sit. For a lot of old school speaker designs, that’s fairly accurate. In that setup, you will be sitting in the “ideal position” for the speakers, the so-called “sweet spot.” With that said, a lot of speakers need a certain distance to the listening position to integrate properly, so if your room is not wide enough for you to place the speakers and sit at an adequate distance, you have a problem.

The integration problem has to do with the timing offset between your ears and each driver in your speaker. If you have the tweeters at ear level, the tweeters are closer to your ear than the midrange and woofers and this causes some timing inaccuracy. If you’re very close to the speakers, the distance between the drivers versus the distance to your ears is a higher proportion than if you are sitting farther away. At the sweet spot, you’re at the right distance for all the frequencies to integrate correctly.

The angle of the speakers also matters in many designs, particularly for the high frequencies. High frequencies have a tendency to lose energy rapidly off axis, a phenomenon called “beaming.” This means if you are too far off axis from old school speakers, the high frequencies won’t reach you. This means you have to position your speakers at the correct distance and angle them correctly as well.

However, these problems don’t exist in all speakers. For example, you can get alignment between your tweeter and midrange by using a coaxial driver. A good coaxial presents the highs and mids perfectly time aligned, which makes the integration distance shorter. Digital signal processing can further align the woofer to the coaxial, so the integration distance is almost nothing. That means you can put your speakers as far apart as you want and still sit as close as you want. To go one more step, with a coaxial driver you have the opportunity to use the midrange as not only a driver but also a waveguide for your tweeter, which sidesteps the beaming problem, so you don’t have to point your speakers in nearly as much.

Fortunately, we’ve done all of these things in our 8″ speakers. You can place them almost any way you want, sit anywhere you want, and they will perform for you. Which is to say, some 8″ speakers might not work for your room, but ours will.

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