What are your biggest concerns when buying a true wireless headset? According to Qualcomm's "Audio Product Usage Survey Report 2021", 51% of people consider sound quality as the first factor to consider when buying real wireless headphones. Moreover, sound quality has been the most important option for people when buying true wireless headphones for 6 consecutive years.
When it comes to sound quality, it is also the focus that all headphone manufacturers will focus on in the product detail page. There are many factors that can affect the sound quality of a headset, such as the design of the headphone cavity, the supported audio formats, etc. will have an impact on the sound quality of the headphones. Among them, the diaphragm is an important factor related to the quality of sound. Headphone manufacturers have also worked hard for this small diaphragm, trying to use a variety of different materials to create a diaphragm. There are paper diaphragms, wood diaphragms, metal diaphragms as well as biological and plastic diaphragms. Why do manufacturers go to such great lengths in the matter of diaphragms. What is the difference between them? Why is there a tendency to choose plastic as a material in the end?
To unlock the secret of the diaphragm, we must also start from the sound principle of the headphones. According to its transduction principle, headphones can be divided into three categories: dynamic headphones, moving iron headphones and electrostatic headphones. Dynamic headphones are the most common in consumer headphones, and their sounding principle is similar to that of the speaker of the speaker. First, when the audio signal current passes through the coil of the speaker, the coil produces a magnetic field change, causing the coil to produce mechanical vibration, and the coil drives the vibration of the diaphragm. Because the audio signal current changes very quickly, the diaphragm will also vibrate at a high speed at the same time, causing the air around it to vibrate accordingly, which produces sound waves, and you can hear the sound coming out of the headphones.
So why are there so many materials for diaphragms? It is because the dynamic unit has very high requirements for the diaphragm, which must be both rigid and hard, light in weight, and very high in toughness. The rigidity and hardness of the diaphragm can reduce the distortion of the sound quality of the headphones. The transient response of the light-weight headphones of the diaphragm is fast, and the headphones are easier to push. The high toughness of the diaphragm can effectively suppress the generation of resonance. However, in nature, there are almost no hard, high and light materials, so headphone manufacturers have taken pains to find materials that are almost "perfect".
Among them, the paper diaphragm can meet the conditions in weight and toughness, but the hardness is not enough. The hardness of the metal diaphragm is hard enough, but it lacks toughness. Each material has its advantages and limitations. Plastic, which is light and thin, has good toughness and hardness, is easy to produce, and has a low cost has become the preferred diaphragm material for most manufacturers. In addition, manufacturers will also add various elements to the plastic to further improve the performance of plastic diaphragms. That's what you'll often see with composite diaphragms, or graphene diaphragms, etc.
To sum up, the reason why there are various materials of the diaphragm is nothing more than to achieve an optimal balance between hardness, toughness and weight, so that the sound quality of the headphones can reach the best state. The material of the diaphragm is very important for the sound quality performance of the headset, but when purchasing headphones, you do not need to be too superstitious about the material of the diaphragm. Because sound quality is a comprehensive problem for headphones, it involves all aspects of headphones. In the end, the sound quality performance of a headset depends on their own ears to personally conclude, do not look at the manufacturer's overemphasis on a certain diaphragm material and go astray.
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