INTRO.HTM --- Part of Manual for Driver Parameter Calculator --- by Claus Futtrup.
Created 17. February 2002, last revised 17. February 2002. Ported to XHTML 1.0 on 2. October 2004. Last modified 25. October 2004.

Introduction

What is Driver Parameter Calculator (DPC) and what can it do for you?

DPC is an interactive editor for loudspeaker driver parameters. The basic idea is that you enter known parameters and DPC calculates other parameters for you. This is an easy way to check the quality of data from a driver manufacturer, a software database etc.

Since DPC supports multiple setups you can use DPC for calculating or converting between SI units (MKSA), imperial units (UK) etc.

Also supported is measuring data, eg. calculating parameters using the Carrion-Isbert method for lossy closed boxes. Extra mass load by baffle load is supported by several techniques. Measuring diaphragm surfacearea (Sd) is supported when both measuring methods are applied (measuring with the Closed box method as well as the Added mass method).

This way DPC handles several advanced topcis, which are normally ignored. The measurements are 100% following the DIY (do-it-yourself) way, which means that a minimum of required and inexpensive hardware will be necessary.

DPC uses probably the most advanced model of air in the industry to make sure that everything is following the law of physics correctly. The limits of the air model is obscure, like ultra-low (or high) pressure and/or low/high temperature is supported. This means that abnormal conditions are supported, worst case being the car environment anywhere in the world (see the EN 60721 standards).

DPC supports saving data to disk and loading data from disk for future reference. This makes up for a simple database, preferably to show up in the future.

The documentation for DPC is more than 300 kb of documentation (more than a 100 pages of printed text). These files describes all sides of DPC, and a lot on the parameters. Most people can learn quite a bit from reading this manual.

Anybody is welcome to use whatever they learn in their own software or spreadsheets, books etc. but please give credits where credit applies. I have spent a long time on some of these topics, and if you had never come this far without reading the documentation of DPC, which is supposed to be very easy to read and understand (always relatively speaking), then please give credits to me when using these documents for your own developments.

Direct copying of material from DPC manual pages is prohibited unless I explicitly give permission to do so.