ELI5:How far does a speaker move in and out when it vibrates? And do the air molecules next to it move the exact same distance?

No, it's not the same.

A sound wave is a pressure wave, or a force over an area. So let's imagine our speaker is in a tube the same diameter of the cone (pretend its flat) so the area of the pressure wave acting on the speaker and the air is the same. We call this "plane wave" propagation" where the pressure wave travels outward from the sound source as a flat plane of vibrating pressure, as opposed to the real world where it expands as a sphere.

If the area is the same, and the pressure the same, that means the force acting on the speaker is the same force acting on the air. Without doing a ton of math, you can imagine that the mass of air is smaller than the mass of the speaker cone, so if the force acting on them is the same the acceleration of both is different, therefore the velocity is different... which implies that the distance the air particles travel and the speaker cone travels is different.

Note I'm talking about the peak change in distance, or how far forward or back the particles or cone move.... because the net change in distance is 0.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread