Digital feedback control of the frequency response of a conventional loudspeaker

Sammanfattning: Automatic control design and Hi-Fi loudspeakers are two areas that not very often are combined. In 1976 Karl Erik Ståhl performed a master thesis project at KTH where he, with analog circuits, made a positive feedback loop to manipulate the mechanical parameters of a loudspeaker. That project introduced the idea to use control design when constructing loudspeakers. In this project this idea is pursued. For a subwoofer, the interesting thing from a control perspective is that it is the low frequency range that has to be controlled as opposed to the high frequency range which is normally the case in disturbance and servo problems. This master thesis project will present a solution to this problem where a digital signal processor is used to handle the feed back information. The IMC controller implemented in the processor is based on models derived from data, measured in the tailor made laboratory set-up that was built for the project. In order to satisfy the sampling rate requirements, the complexity of the control algorithm had to be restricted. Despite this limitation in the equipment, the frequency response of the loudspeaker was improved significantly at low frequencies.