Source: Amazon Oneplus nord earbuds
As said, technology at your finger tip or technology in your pocket, today's devices comes packed with many technologies fitted inside one minute housing. Likewise earphones have become so compact that it just occupies one third of your regular pocket. You might have noticed or read this whenever you go to buy earphones, the word 'Driver', many brands claim they have 10mm, 12mm, so on driver present in their devices. Now the question is, what is this 'Driver' term in earphone specification that frequently highlighted in product cover photo and does it really important to consider during your purchase? lets understand.
Driver is a main component in earbuds comprised of magnet, coils and diaphragm, together they produce wonderful sound you like to hear. This is one driver type out in market and very common across most earphone, commonly called Dynamic drivers. Dynamic driver is one of many drivers, we have Planar Magnetic Drivers, Electrostatic Driver, Balanced Armature Drivers, Hybrid Driver and so on. These types are meant for different application and pretty costly. Now as a gadget buyer focus on Dynamic Driver, as it is most used driver. Driver comes with different quality, as you pay more, you get more in terms of quality. Driver are made from different materials, ferrite built magnets are less costly than neodynamic magnets, HI-OFC and PCOCC copper coils are more costly than regular copper so on, all these factors decide the price of the earphone, it is also one of the technical point user should look into when going through spec documents. Next the spec also says the size of driver, some brands say they have 10mm and some say 12mm or 13mm driver fitted earphones, user might get confuse and assume the larger the size the better the quality, but nothing so, larger driver size deliver good bass but the quality of sound is decided by not only by size but as told, the material used to build and also how sensitive and strong they are towards the power fed, cheap material drivers can't hold high power and chances to break is more, also the sound gets distorted.
Apart from driver build material and it's size there are other features which impact sound quality by drivers, those are Sensitivity and Impendence. Despite of good quality built, if Sensitivity is not in perfect range (good range 75dB to 110dB) then the driver loudness also fall into not comfortable zone and if Impendence is high (good range 15 to 32 ohms) then you listen low sound. For good quality earphone, driver is most important part and user have to carefully look into specification for all these factors. Price of the product is always proportional to the built quality and material used, so driver is heart of earphone and we have to consider it as very important specification component whenever we go for earphone purchase.
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