Ask any audiophile about the role of the speakers in the audio system, and you'll get one invariable answer: the most important.

The first sound reproduction was done more than a hundred years ago. But it is in the last 50 years that technology has known an accelerated development, from the modest mono sound to the complete home theater experience.

Here is a bit of history for this evolution. In the next section we'll speak more about how audio speakers manage to reproduce sound.

A monophonic speaker is made of a single channel that reproduces unidirectional sound.

Stereophonic - or stereo sound, added a sense of spatiality to an audio session by using two channels, left and right. Stereo sound was rocking the parties back in the 1950s. How was this made? By making each channel concentrate certain elements of the sound. For example when listening to your favorite bands, as Beatles or The Stones, it may appear that the leading vocals, either John or Mick are reproduced by the left channel, while the back vocals emerge from the right channel.

The stereo worked fine for a generation or two, but people wanted their recordings to sound even more lively, just like in the movies. The solution was to add speakers to the system and make it seem like the sound was coming from everywhere.

Walt Disney was the first to use surround sound in his movie Fantasia (1941), helped by the engineers at Bell Labs. The technology didn't improve too much until the 1970s, with the invention of the Dolby Stereo Sound, that used a four optical channel-setup. In 1992 the Dolby Digital Surround system introduced the 5.1 channel configuration for the first time.

Also in the 1990s, the Dolby Digital surround sound first entered the consumer homes in the 5.1 setup: three front channels from which the front-middle reproduces voices and dialogues, two rear channels that reproduce ambient sounds and one subwoofer for the deep bass frequencies. To learn more about the evolution of the surround sound systems, here's a very interesting article by Michael Miller, The History of Surround Sound.

Beside the number of channels involved, modern times also require increased mobility from both speakers and headphones. Our study is focused on wireless speakers & headphones, but also on special destination drivers as car speakers, marine speakers, rock speakers and planters.