IUPUI Music Tech Blog

As you may know, one of the final goals of our speaker restoration project is to show-off the speaker’s capabilities in a small-scale performance downtown. The performers are the remainder of the collaborators associated with the project on the IUPUI side, students and faculty who are experienced with gigs of this nature. Christian Rangel is a senior Music Technology student at IUPUI and oversees the musical content being presented for the project. He plans for a very chill, ambient experience where the audience is free to listen as they admire the speaker. I’ve had the opportunity to hear a bit of it, and I can say with confidence that it’ll be a very enjoyable evening for everyone involved. Our second collaborator on this final performance is our very own faculty advisor, Dr. Doug Bielmeier . Dr. Doug is an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at IUPUI and has many years of experience working as a recording engineer in Nashville and Washington D.C. His specialty is

This week we're going to give a quick update on how the speaker rehabilitation is going, starting with an introduction on the student in charge of the repairs.   Keher   Neote  is a first-year returning Electrical Engineering student who's been building and repairing speakers for about three to four years. Though not quite an expert, he's definitely one of the more learned audiophiles on campus  with an especially keen interest in speaker design. This is his fourth speaker restoration project to date (his first since starting at IUPUI last semester) and it has been proceeding as planned   since the day we picked the speakers up back in January. His project goals include the following:  analyzing the potential of each speaker, specifically its cabinet and driver,  taking SPL (sound-pressure-level) measurements of each driver to decide how well these speakers perform compared to today's standards, presenting these  findings  to fellow speaker enthusiasts, and r

The heart of the speaker. Stylish. This week, we’re wrapping up our background coverage of this project by getting into the real nitty gritty of what goes on behind the scenes when designing an audio speaker. What exactly makes up a speaker? How does it produce music? What clever design decisions do the RCA speakers we’re working with exhibit? The tweeter nestled inside the subwoofer cone. Dynamic speaker design basically boils down to a few basic components: a permanent magnet, a “voice coil” that is capable of producing a magnetic field, and some kind of vibrating material. It relies on the vibration caused by alternating current passing through the voice coil creating a magnetic field that interacts with the magnetic field of the larger, permanent magnet. This vibrates the air between the two, causing the vibrating material to move back and forth and produce sound. Modern speakers utilize two separate configurations of this vibrating apparatus, the su