Our classrooms have a problem. Poor audio is reducing the impact of our lessons. Students are used to multimedia surroundings. If we are to engage them, why do we neglect the most crucial element? The key to submersing students into curriculum is to affect all of the senses—engage every learning style. When carving out a budget for classroom technology, many schools concentrate on the visual implements and completely overlook the auditory requirements. Some think that simply adding “gamming-style”, self-powered speakers will do the job. This just isn’t so, but why not? Well…that is the question I want to answer while we discuss sound reproduction and the components that make it happen.

Here are some of the basic components of any audio system:

The speakers are the primary instruments that are responsible for converting electrical impulses into audible intonation. They make the room come alive. Electrical signals travel through speaker wire and terminate at a voice coil wrapped around the base of the speaker diaphragm (or woofer). A powerful magnet surrounds this coil, and, when charged, the coil drives the diaphragm in and out of magnet. This oscillation disturbs the air around the diaphragm—creating sound. Larger woofers naturally have a larger surface area and, therefore, can push greater amounts of air. These are great for generating lower frequency sound (mid to bass). Smaller, harder diaphragms are used to reproduce high frequency sound (treble). The amount of watts that a speaker requires is determined by a number of complicated factors that I wont go into here. But, it is important to know that you can typically gauge how effective speakers will be at filling space with sound by looking at how many watts are required. The higher the wattage, the greater capacity the speaker has to generate the full audio environment you are looking for.

But where does this signal come from? Depended on your system, it comes from the amplifier. An amplifier takes the weak signal that comes from the source—such as a microphone, DVD player, or computer—and increases the wattage so you can broadcast this sound on large speakers. Gaming-style speakers typically have built-in “operational amplifiers” that give the speakers just enough power to create sound for a small space. While some of these speakers can get pretty loud, they loose clarity at high volume. If you want to waste hours of your life sitting in your room playing World of Warcraft, these will do just fine. However, the best solution for a classroom-sized space is a dedicated amplifier, especially one that has a “graphic equalizer” built in. The equalizer allows the user to adjust the sound output and optimize it for speech, music, video, or other types of audio sources.

The last key component is the audio source. As mentioned earlier, this can be any multitude of devices. Microphones, video cameras, computers, DVD players, Radios, and PA systems are a few examples of sources. With a proper amplifier, all of these sources can be permanently attached to the system, reducing the amount of setup time and headaches caused by switching between activities.

If you are struggling to get the highest level of engagement from each lesson, I would ask you can your students hear and understand what it is you are trying to tell them. Take a look at this solution for increasing your students’ participation.